Archives for 2010

1. GPB News (USA) – Virtual Worlds Help Disabled Students. “The National Science Foundation gave $1.5 million to The University of Georgia and Georgia Institute of Technology to help raise the number of students with disabilities getting degrees in science, technology, engineering and math. The collaborative program uses specially designed virtual classrooms inside Second Life where students can interact with mentors from around the world without leaving home. Robert Todd is a senior researcher with the Center For Assistive Technology and Environmental Access at Georgia Tech. “It will be what you might call an idealized or a better version of the classroom. Because we can do what we can imagine we can make the classroom more engaging and more interesting to students.”

2. Los Angeles Times (USA) – Cutting-edge virtual reality technology in development in Playa Vista. “Computer-simulated battlefields, three-dimensional video teleconferencing and sprawling virtual worlds are just a few of the tools being developed at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. The cutting-edge research institute, known as ICT, recently opened a facility in Playa Vista where it develops virtual environments used to train U.S. military personnel. A story in today’s Times features the institute, whose work is used by the military for purposes including training fighters to combat insurgents and calming nerves of weary soldiers. ICT’s wide-ranging technologies are now found on 65 military sites across the country. As the Pentagon has stepped up spending on training military personnel through simulations, ICT’s funding has increased from $5 million in 1999 to about $30 million this year.”

3. Mobile Computing News (UK) – MMOGs moderated by machine. “MOGs or ‘massively multiplayer online games’ are the internet’s main attraction for thousands of users all around the world. Virtual worlds where players can live out fantasies in real time and interact with other live players have become the apex of online gaming as we know it. With thousands of people playing MMOGs on various servers and networks, the need to moderate gaming activity has become a fundamental issue which game developers are working on improving.”

4. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Bargain region hosting: What you get for $9.90. “OpenSim hosting company New Voice offers full OpenSim regions for just $9.90 per month. So what do you actually get for this amount of money? A region in Second Life, after all, costs $300 — not to mention a $1,000 setup fee. There are no setup fees with New Voice. Can New Voice really offer a full region for under $10 — and 45,000 prims, full region backups, and hypergrid connectivity to boot? Their customer growth numbers seem to indicate that they can. When we first talked to the company in August, they were running just 40 regions. Today, New Voice is running 124 regions for customers.”

5. Chicago Tribune (USA) – Second Life talk given both locally, virtually. “Tom Boellstorff is an anthropologist at the University of California at Irvine and editor of American Anthropologist. For years, he specialized in the study of gay Indonesians. That is, until he also began to specialize in the anthropological study of Second Life, the online virtual world launched in 2003 by Linden Lab. It hosts 18 million users, who create avatars to represent their physical selves, then, say, create homes for those avatars and socialize with other avatars.”

6. The Economist (UK) – Living in a see-through world. “Cows moo if they need to be milked, but otherwise they do not show a great desire to communicate—until now. A Dutch start-up called Sparked has devised a system that keeps track of a cow’s health. A sensor attached to the ear of the animal reads its vital signs and transmits a mass of data wirelessly to a computer, which crunches the numbers and sends a message to the farmer if, for instance, the cow is about to give birth. Far from being just an anecdote from the animal kingdom, these networked cows are part of an exciting technological trend. As our special report in this issue explains, the physical and the virtual worlds are converging, thanks to the proliferation of sensors, ubiquitous wireless networks and clever analytics software. Increasingly there will be two interconnected worlds: the real one and its digital reflection.”

7. Singularity Hub (USA) – New Augmented Reality Software Removes Objects From Video Feeds In Realtime. “What if you could remove all the ugliness in the world? It’s not a hypothetical question. Researchers at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany have developed a new augmented reality technique that erases images from real time video. Called Diminished Reality, the software can take any area selected in a video feed and use photo-shop like adjustments to copy the surroundings into its place. Where once you saw an object now you see the object has been removed. A piece of your world has been erased. Diminished Reality records video from a camera and displays the modified result on a screen with only a 40ms delay. To your eyes it’s effectively instantaneous. Watch a demonstration of the augmented reality editing program in the video below. I’m blown away by how well it works in these early examples.”

8. Kotaku (Australia) – How Video Games Changed Our Science Fiction Fantasy. “Roger Ebert has said that video games cannot be art. Similar judgments have been made over the decades and centuries about novels, plays, movies, television, comic books, and of course science fiction. Now, video games are up in front of the Supreme Court. Once again a new and innovative form of art and entertainment is being put through an almost ritualised process of legal justification. My take? The Supreme Court will decide video games are protected speech. And video games are definitely capable of being art.”

9. WoW Insider (USA) – “The Raid” movie documentary examines WoW raiding. “If there’s anything I’ve learned over the years as a gamer, it’s to approach films and TV shows about games or gaming with extreme caution. Be it cinematic game-to-film monstrosities like the Street Fighter movie or sensationalist “documentary” garbage like the fifth estate’s Top Gun, there always seems to be a disconnect between the people operating the camera and the subjects they’re trying to portray. World of Warcraft in particular has received plenty of positive and negative attention, but in recent years, there has been an increasing movement among geeky creatives to try their hand at explaining the game and the phenomenon of its popularity through all sorts of projects. The Raid is one of those projects.”

10. Chronicle of Higher Education (USA) – A ‘Stealth Assessment’ Turns to Video Games to Measure Thinking Skills. “Colleges no longer simply want to know what their students know, but how they think. Higher-order thinking skills are “something that schools are paying a little bit more attention to these days,” says Jeffrey Steedle, a measurement scientist at the Council for Aid to Education, whose Collegiate Learning Assessment essays are used at several hundred colleges to test students’ abilities to synthesize arguments and write persuasively. “It’s largely in response to the recognition that these skills are needed to be competitive in the global marketplace.” But educators also say that paper-and-pencil examinations have limits—for one thing, knowing that you are being tested can drag down performance—and they are looking for new methods to measure skills like critical thinking, creativity, and persistence.”

1. Gamasutra (USA) – Report: Universal Monsters-Themed MMO Planned. “Universal Pictures reportedly signed an agreement with SEE Virtual Worlds, the studio behind the Michael Jackson-themed MMO, to create an online game starring classic movie monsters like Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. In last month’s announcement for Planet Michael, its MMO centered on the late King of Pop, SEE Virtual Worlds said it would create a “virtual reality universe of connected planets”, with each planet tied to other licensed film, television, sports, music, and entertainment properties.”

2. Coventry Telegraph (UK) – Coventry University publishes guide to virtual worlds. “A GUIDE to using virtual worlds in higher education has been published by Coventry University. The book, A practical guide to using Second Life in Higher Education, helps teachers understand how to use the online social networking virtual world. Professor Maggi Savin-Baden is one of the UK’s leading academics on the subject and has used virtual technology extensively as a teaching resource. Professor Savin-Baden said: “This practical handbook had been designed to support teachers who want to use Second Life and provides both an overview and a detailed consideration of the opportunities this immersive world offers for teaching, learning, assessment and research.”

3. Search Engine Watch (USA) – Mingling In Virtual Worlds. “Last week I talked about games within Second Life that you could play. In theory all of these games can be social, but just how do you get social through a game? It’s much easier than you might think. Knowing where people hang out is the key. Let’s start with the obvious one, the Roleplaying Games. With these games you show up at a specific location as your avatar dressed and ready to pretend to be the character for the game.”

4. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – HuzuTech Announces Virtual World Platform. “British technology firm HuzuTech has announced that it will launch a white label 3D virtual world platform, HuzuVirtual, next week. The platform is for use by brands, publishers, film, and TV production houses that want to create promotional virtual worlds. The platform is designed to be flexible, scalable, and fully customizable. HuzuTech plans to initially work with children’s publishers and is already developing a virtual world for the Scholastic’s Horrible Histories line set to launch in June 2011. ”

5. Kotaku (USA) – A Computer Mind To Finger The Real Bullies, Pedophiles and Killers of Virtual Worlds. “When the text-heavy fantasy worlds of multi-user dungeons first invaded the mainframes of Essex University and the dial-ups of Compuserve, there were few rules in place and even fewer ways to enforce them. But today’s most modern of virtual worlds now include cutting-edge technology used to not just provide an immersive experience but also to hunt down the potential real-world predators, bullies and criminals lurking in the online games. The idea of actively policing how people play massively multiplayer online games didn’t really come about until the phrase massively multiplayer online games became not only a part of gamer parlance, but also a viable commercial genre with the 1997 launch of Ultima Online.”

6. News.com.au (Australia) – What are video games missing? Swishy skirts. “Another obstacle on the way to super-realistic video games looks set to be demolished. Over the years, games have become more and more lifelike. Clouds, trees, buildings and bodies all look pretty faithful in today’s virtual worlds. But there’s one thing game developers still struggle with — the movement of clothing. Now researchers in Germany think they’ve solved the problem with a new way of creating virtual models of actors by comparing 3D laser scans and video footage. New Scientist reported that software developed by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics was able to create “extremely realistic” avatars of actors and their costumes. When the avatars were programmed to perform new movements that the real actors never did, their clothes still swished and crinkled realistically.”

7. Gazette Live (UK) – Virtual world used to get teens talking. “Teenagers are to be encouraged to create their own virtual world to help Teesside University with key research. Researchers at the university are looking into what it means for young people to be British. They will be quizzing the teenagers about their values and aspirations using a virtual environment, as part of a citizenship project. To keep the youngsters’ identity secret, people taking part will be encouraged to create virtual worlds and their own avatar. The research is backed by a £250,000 grant, with £195,000 coming from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.”

8. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Paper: hypergrid allows virtual world to grow without limit. “The invention of the hypergrid will allow virtual worlds to grow to the size of the World Wide Web, or bigger, according to a paper made public today by OpenSim core developer Justin Clark-Casey. “The World Wide Web is much larger than any existing virtual environment system,” he wrote in the dissertation, submitted for his Masters in Software Engineering at the University of Oxford. “The World Wide Web has 1.6 billion estimated users while even the most popular online role playing game has only 11.5 million monthly subscribers.” One problem is that virtual environments are normally highly centralized — an environment’s servers, databases, even browsers are typically all controlled by a single company.”

9. San Francisco Chronicle (USA) – PlaySpan Integrates PayPal X Into its Video Monetization-as-a-Service Platform. “PlaySpan, the global leader in monetizing online games, social networks, virtual worlds and videos, announced today a partnership with PayPal to integrate PayPal X into its recently launched Video Monetization Platform. The first PlaySpan Video Monetization Platform integration to go live with PayPal X is on the PlaySpan Marketplace (PSM), where user generated commerce is transacted over virtual currency, virtual goods, games and videos. “We’re extremely excited about working with PayPal X to make PlaySpan’s in-video micropayments platform even more accessible to our media clients and providing them global reach to our gaming audience of millions of users,” Karl Mehta, CEO, PlaySpan.”

10. Kotaku (Australia) – When An MMO Dies. “A tricked-out dune buggy busts through a mural made up of post-apocalyptic imagery and battered road signs in the front of NetDevil’s Colorado offices, a lasting reminder of a world that came and went in the blink of an eye. Traditional video games are timeless. As long as one has the right equipment and their cartridge or disc is in working order, revisiting them is easy enough. Their levels, enemies and challenges live on. This is not the case with massively multiplayer online games. Massively multiplayer online games require a substantial investment. The developers spend time and effort creating these games, dedicate resources and manpower to maintaining game servers and supporting players and must continue to develop fresh content to keep players interested.”