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The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. AdAge (USA) – Guinness Lets U.K. Drinkers Create Virtual Worlds. “Guinness is offering U.K. drinkers a personalized virtual-reality experience in a partnership with Google Earth that lets people create their own worlds and then invite friends to join them via Facebook. The Diageo-owned stout is best known for its epic TV commercials, but Guinness is moving its marketing online in order to build a more interactive relationship with drinkers.”

2. TechCrunch (USA) – My Virtual Head Would Look Great On Your Virtual Body! Gizmoz Merges With Daz 3D. “Since Israeli startup Gizmoz launched three years ago, people have used its technology to create millions of 3D-realistic avatar heads from photos of themselves. But what good is a head without a body? Gizmoz found a body—lots of them, actually—in a Utah-based company called Daz 3D. The two companies are merging. Existing investors, led by Benchmark Capital, Highway 12 Ventures, and Columbia Capital, are put in an additional $5.3 million into the new, yet-to-be-named company. Previously, Gizmoz raised a total of $12.8 million, most recently $6.5 million in March, 2008 from the venture arm of Docomo, which also participated in the latest round. Daz 3D raised $4 million back in June, 2007, and targeted creative professionals as customers.”

3. SBS (Australia) – Alter Ego. “Alter Ego is a documentary about virtual worlds on the internet, but ironically it’s really a story about people. Mind you, these are not just any people. You could call them eccentric. The more callous, when pressed, would say they were odd. But in each case we meet real people dealing with real challenges in an unconventional way – online in a virtual reality world called Second Life where their alter ego takes precedent. Our first Second Lifer is 37-year-old Melbourne man Andy, a frustrated musician and self-confessed “bum.” If there’s a rebellious, alternative path to take in life, Andy’s will take it. His cousin Pearlie, whom we also meet, describes Andy’s music as “fiercely non-commercial.” And she’s not wrong. I can’t understand the appeal of his songs where the guitar and vocals are set to different rhythms. But Andy’s happy.”

4. Arabian Business (UAE) – Virtual worlds – Arabic style. “One only needs to utter the words “World of Warcraft” to grab the attention of many avid gamers. This classic game is a primary example of how Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming has taken the world by storm, especially when one considers that it has 11 to 12 million subscribers. Other kinds of MMO games out there, apart from WoW, include the likes of Everquest II, Runescape, Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online and many more. The very nature of MMOs are such that they are capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of players playing simultaneously on the internet in what is a persistent virtual world. These games typically feature character avatars, online chat, a level editor and network play. There is often character progression, whereby players first need to go through a character creation process choosing the race, profession, appearance and specific skills that are of interest.”

5. Gamers Daily News (USA) – Be at Home in the London Pub. “EEMEE, an independent creator of branded and original content for games platforms and virtual worlds, are excited to announce details of the first virtual London Pub releasing on January 7th 2010 in PlayStation Home, priced at €4.99. Based on your favourite London watering hole, situated on the banks of the river Thames overlooking The Houses of Parliament, The London Pub personal space comes complete with a multi-player darts game, a roaring open fire, comedy beer pumps, crank phone calls and hand dryers that don’t dry your hands (they’re only virtual you know).”

6. VentureBeat (USA) – IMVU and myYearbook set up virtual currency exchange. “Two successful online sites are getting together to encourage their users to adopt the other’s services. IMVU and myYearbook are setting up a virtual currency exchange so that users from either service can exchange currency between the sites. The deal is significant because it is a step toward a universal virtual currency, which could have profound implications for the economies of games and virtual worlds, creating the ability for fluid movement between different sites.”

7. The Guardian (UK) – Video games: the decade when playtime took over. “Seasoned gamers would say that every decade feels like a tumultuous one. This is, after all, the entertainment medium in which the major content delivery platforms – ie, the home consoles – are reinvented every five years. And if you’re a PC owner trying to stay at the cutting edge – well, that’ll be a graphics card and processor update at least every 18 months, thank you. Moore’s law can be a bitch like that. But the Noughties has been a standout period – mostly for the acceptance of video gaming as a mainstream activity. Sure, it bloomed during the 90s as the well-marketed PlayStation console courted a generation of cash-rich twentysomethings with no family commitments and bags of free time. But this was still boys playing games together. It wasn’t until the 2000s that the industry really started to hit the family living room, rather than the teenage bedroom or shared bachelor pad.”

8. Marketing Vox News (USA) – 3M’s Real World Privacy Filters Get Virtual Campaign. “3M has launched a virtual goods marketing campaign to promote its Privacy Filters product line. It’s a serious product and serious subject – filters designed to prevent data theft in public places by making a computer screen impossible to read from the side. The campaign, though, focuses on the lighthearted with several TMI (“Too Much Information”) themed virtual goods designed for the campaign. When opened, these virtual items opened to reveal funny short videos of embarrassing moments with the warning, “Don’t let TMI happen to you.” There is also a Facebook application where consumers can watch other embarrassing videos, choose other TMI ‘badges,’ and send them to friends.”

9. VentureBeat (USA) – Multiverse’s Remix makes it easy to create Avatar spinoff games. “James Cameron’s high profile sci fi movie Avatar, which hits theaters tomorrow, will be accompanied by a ton of accompanying merchandise and spinoff products. And thanks to a small company called Multiverse, two big brands, Coca-Cola and McDonalds, were able to easily create some spinoff web games based on the themes in the film. Mountain View, Calif.-based Multiverse has built a platform that can be used to pop out one virtual world after another. And both Coca-Cola and McDonalds made use of a new Multiverse technology, dubbed Remix, that takes the digital assets created for a film — such as a computer animated character’s face or body — and automatically turns it into something that can be used in a game.”

10. ZDNet Asia (Singapore) – Businesses get a Second Life. “The spotlight on Second Life as a marketing tool has dimmed with the emergence of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, although the virtual world is increasingly used by enterprises internally for virtual meetings and events, says its developer, Linden Lab. Second Life saw its hype peak two years ago as users flocked to the platform. According to reports at the time, however, businesses setting up virtual shop there did not profit from their online ventures, nor where they expected to in the immediate years to come. Some companies today are putting more emphasis on social media platforms like Facebook–which reached 300 million users in September–and Twitter. Greg Fisher, head of advertising and marketing services at Intel Technology Asia told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview that Intel, which launched a Second Life marketing campaign in 2007, is increasingly leveraging “more traditional” social media channels such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter to reach Asia-Pacific mainstream consumers.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. San Francisco Chronicle (USA) – FTC: Explicit Virtual world content easy for minors to see. “The Federal Trade Commission today said minors can access explicit sexual and vilolent content in 70% of the virtual worlds it reviewed in a congressionally mandated report and urged virtual world operators to make key enhancements aimed at reducing the risk of youth exposure to such content. The report, The Virtual Worlds and Kids: Mapping the Risks, looked at 27 online virtual worlds — such as Poptropica, Runescape and Zwinktopia — divided among those specifically intended for young children, teens and those intended only for adults. The FTC found at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19 of the 27 worlds and observed a heavy amount of explicit content in five of the virtual worlds studied.”

2. Defence Systems (USA) – Second Life demonstrates mingling of real and virtual worlds. “While the public version of the Second Life virtual world remains primarily a playground for self expression and social networking, military and government agencies are taking a more serious look at its practical applications now that its maker, Linden Lab, has created a version of the environment that can be run behind a firewall on private servers. But Second Life is only one of several environments for creating what are sometimes called 3-D Internet experiences. Like Virtual Battle Space 2, Second Life made cameo appearances at several booths around the show floor at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando, Fla., this week.”

3. Crispy Gamer (USA) – Buying Influence: how anti-healthcare reformists use virtual currency. “How much is your voice worth as a United States citizen? 100 virtual coins or a fake hat in your favorite virtual world? And are social game users willing to do anything to earn such things to get ahead in their favorite games? These are the questions being asked as real-world political positions and influence are being purchased by fake dollars and intangible baubles in virtual worlds. The story begins with a trade group representing the health insurance industry that is using a third-party offer in some social network games and virtual worlds to send letters to congress expressing opposition to President Obama’s health care plan, according to a report in Inside Silicon Valley. This questionable third-party offer came to light when a company called OMGPOP tipped the publication off, providing it with a screenshot of the offer in progress.”

4. TechCrunch Europe (Germany) – Twinity’s virtual London opens for business. “Twinity, the virtual world that mirrors the real world, has finally launched a beta of virtual London. And if mirroring the real world includes replicating London’s reputation for delayed construction works, then Berlin-based Metaversum, the company behind Twinity, is doing just fine. The virtual world, which distinguishes itself from the likes of Second Life by building exact replicas of well known cities, launched back in 2006 and while London was always planned to follow Berlin and Singapore, it feels like it’s been a long time coming. And tough luck if you are on a Mac – the 3D browser only supports Windows XP and Vista.”

5. WoW.com (USA) – How the WoW community is about to push the self-destruct button. “This post is going to be very meta in some regards, and it’s going to touch on a few things that deal with the WoW community’s very existence. We’ve wrote this article in hopes that it might help calm the waters, or at least bring some will on the part of the multitudes of individuals not to jump on the wrong bandwagon. If you’ve been paying attention to the role forums and the “Ghostcrawler drama” this past week, you know what I’m talking about. If not, we’ll begin with a brief rundown.”

6. The Guardian (UK) – Gamesblog Christmas Book Corner. “We’re rarely sent videogame-related books for review, which is shame as I’m always happy to cover them on the blog – especially when they’re rather esoteric and intellectual, thereby providing raw material for some of my more, erm, ‘conceptual’ postings (i.e. pretty much anything through the slow summer months). Anyway, The MIT Press has sent over two books that I’m currently reading simultaneously, and they’re both worth a look if you’re interested in reasonably heavyweight game theory.”

7. The Toronto Star (Canada) – Avatar: James Cameron’s new world. “In science fiction, they call it “world building” – the long, often-exhausting process of imagining not just a story but the whole vast new environment it takes place in. James Cameron had Pandora, the world filmgoers will visit this week when they rush to see Avatar, in his head for two decades – but it was Peter Jackson who showed him that it could be brought to life.”

8. NPR (USA) – In Which Virtual World Will You Choose To Spend What’s Left Of Eternity? “You won’t read about it in the headlines, but deep in the high-tech corporate campus of the Research Triangle Park, in Durham, North Carolina, desperate refugees fight for survival against mutant cannibals in a dystopian wasteland where civilization is just a dim memory. No, it’s not a hyperbolic recession metaphor (at least not exclusively), it’s Fallen Earth, the post-apocalyptic virtual world created and maintained by RTP game company Icarus Studios. Fallen Earth, you see, is a video game — one in which thousands of players play simultaneously via the Internet and their personal computers.”

9. The Irish Times (Ireland) – Research reveals video games are stimulating to the brain. “PARENTS BUYING video games this Christmas will draw comfort from new research suggesting that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, they do not turn kids’ brains to mush. Just as the physical activity-based Nintendo Wii console convinced parents that computer games and sloth do not have to go hand in hand, new research suggests that video games stimulate the brain. A multidisciplinary team of neuroscientists at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, has discovered that video games increase brain activity.”

10. The Guardian (UK) – The internet’s dirty carbon secret. “We’ve been told about the environmental costs of motoring, industrial farming, long-haul flights, big oil, deforestation in the Amazon and buying sweat-shop produced, throwaway fashion. Some of us have taken this advice on board, cycling more, flying less, choosing renewable energy schemes, and seeking out ethical, organic products. We can make these choices because appliances and cars are rated according to their energy consumption, and Fairtrade or organic products have prominently displayed certification logos. The information we need to assess whether a service or product is environmentally friendly is either accessible or it’s just common sense – hopping on an aeroplane every weekend is hardly sustainable, after all. But there’s one particular aspect of most of our everyday lives whose environmental consequences are not so well explained: the internet and online activities.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. The Independent (UK) – Millions and millions of little monsters. “Virtual worlds are booming. This summer, market research firm Strategy Analytics projected that the population of virtual worlds would increase from 186 million inhabitants to 640 million by 2015. And a big part of this giant leap is going to be from young people. Apparently, children between five and nine will boost the market by 27percent while teens will bump it up by 21 per cent. And it’s already happening. ‘Club Penguin’ and ‘Habbo Hotel’ have record numbersofmembers, while the number of children playing online game ‘Moshi Monsters’ (above and left) has hit the10million mark, with one million new users signing up every month.”

2. TechRadar (UK) – Heritage Key VX review. “Before the web came along, virtual environments seemed like the next big thing in interface technology. We now have the processing power to do everything those old-school futurists dreamed about: telepresence, immersive filesystems, cyberspace applications… yet it’s still gamers that make most use of virtual worlds. Heritage Key VX may end up changing all this, though. It’s a mainstream application of a once niche feature that reminds us why we all thought it was such a good idea. While Heritage Key is predominantly an educational website aimed at amateur historians and fans of archaeology, its heart is the 3D virtual exhibit.”

3. Times Online (UK) – Real-world arrest for man who stole RuneScape virtual characters. “A man who hacked into accounts to steal virtual characters and their possessions on one of the world’s biggest multi-player online games has been arrested. In what experts believe is the first case of its kind in Britain, the man obtained log-in details for RuneScape, a web-based role playing game with more than ten million members, to steal their “virtual” characters. Players in the game have often spent years creating their online characters by completing set tasks and activities. Police believe that password details were obtained through a so-called phishing scam where a fake internet page tricks people into handing over their personal information.”

4. Government Computer News (USA) – Second Life demonstrates mingling of real and virtual worlds. “While the public version of the Second Life virtual world remains primarily a playground for self expression and social networking, military and government agencies are taking a more serious look at its practical applications now that its maker, Linden Lab, has created a version of the environment that can be run behind a firewall on private servers. But Second Life is only one of several environments for creating what are sometimes called 3-D Internet experiences. Like Virtual Battle Space 2, Second Life made cameo appearances at several booths around the show floor at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando, Fla., this week.”

5. The University of Texas at Austin News (USA) – Innovator for Teaching with Virtual Worlds Passes Away. “University faculty member and instructional innovator Leslie Jarmon died on Nov. 24 after a 15-year battle with cancer. She was 57. Jarmon was an early adopter of instructional uses of virtual worlds, becoming a role model and advocate for colleagues looking to create new models in pedagogy through innovative uses of emerging technology. Jarmon designed and taught graduate-level courses at the university beginning in 1998 with the Office of Graduate Studies. In fall 2008 she joined the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment as a specialist in faculty development.”

6. The Industry Standard (USA) – UC Irvine offering four year video games program. “Well-known for its excellent courses in engineering, business, and medicine, UC Irvine is now pushing into a new area of expertise; video games. The university announced that it had established its Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds earlier this year by joining forces with the Institute for Software Research and the Game Culture and Technology Laboratory. Construction is currently underway on a 4,000 square-foot, 20-room “cyber interaction observatory” for faculty research, and the plans call for floor-to-ceiling projection screens, and advanced 3D displays.”

7. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Unity Lays Claim to “Fastest Growing” App Platform. “Unity Technologies, a company that produces a game platform many virtual worlds run on, last year created a mobile platform specifically for iPhone app development. Today the company said its iPhone platform was “proving to be the fastest growing game development platform for the iPhone.” Twelve percent of games featured on AppShopper.com’s Top 25 paid-for apps were built with Unity iPhone, says Unity Technologies.”

8. The Globe and Mail (Canada) – When gamers become recruiters. “As 2009 winds down, the world of Facebook has fragmented into two camps: the people who are pretending to be farmers, and the rest, who are busy wishing a plague of locusts upon them. The last few months have witnessed the meteoric rise of a new kind of online time-waster: Facebook games with names such as FarmVille, FishVille, Island Paradise and Cafe World that are calibrated not toward fun, but toward the recruiting of friends and the disgorging of credit card numbers. They propagate with an almost organic zeal – and they have tens of millions of customers to show for it. The question is: How can something so dreary have become so popular?”

9. Calgary Herald (Canada) – An eco-friendly message for young minds. “If we really want to reduce our carbon footprints and make the world a healthier place, we’ll need new generations committed to the ecological cause. A Vancouver startup company says it has found a way to reach young minds, delivering an eco-friendly message that is not preachy and allows kids to have fun. And the future for the company may be green in more ways than one.”

10. TechCrunch (USA) – Second Life Gets A Life 2.0 At Sundance. “Does anybody go to Second Life anymore? It seems like a ghost town these days, although every now and then you hear rumblings of a quiet comeback for the proto-virtual world. Well, at the very least Second Life will be getting a second life at the movies. A documentary called Life 2.0 will be screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Life 2.0 was produced by PalmStar Entertainment (which is theglobe.com co-founder Stephan Paternot’s indie movie company) and Andrew Lauren Productions (The Squid And The Whale).”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. DNA (India) – Virtual worlds will provide real security: Indian origin scientist. “A scientist of Indian origin has determined that advances in computers are making possible virtual worlds in which defense analysts can explore and predict results of many different possible military and policy actions. The scientist in question is VS Subrahmanian, a Maryland computer science professor and director of the University’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). According to Subrahmanian and John Dickerson, a UMIACS computer science researcher, “Defense analysts can understand the repercussions of their proposed recommendations for policy options or military actions by interacting with a virtual world environment.”

2. Canada.com (Canada) – Embracing the future of fitness. “It wasn’t that long ago that running with a Discman was considered cool. Of course, so was talking on a cellphone the size of a brick. Today, people run with a phone that not only plays music and takes calls, it maps your run while tracking speed, mileage, pace and calories burned. And runners aren’t the only exercisers being courted by technology: There are smartphone apps for cyclists, gym junkies, triathletes and swimmers. Even those without a smartphone can hop on the technology bandwagon: Nike and Apple have teamed up to track runners’ stats through an in-shoe transmitter and an iPod. Stationary bikes take cyclists on virtual rides through scenic routes, and provide the opportunity to compete in a virtual race against the cyclist beside you or in the next country.”

3. VentureBeat (USA) – Next Island to launch sci-fi adventure virtual world — with time travel. “Next Island is the latest company to launch an ambitious virtual world. But this sci-fi adventure paradise comes with an interesting twist: time travel. The company is announcing today that it is building a world in MindArk’s massively multiplayer online virtual universe, Entropia Universe. That means it has licensed virtual world technology from MindArk, whose technology is behind Planet Calypso, which until now has been the only virtual world in the Entropia Universe. Next Island will be the “planet” going live in the virtual universe. Its private beta begins in less than 30 days.”

4. brand-e (UK) – New life for Second Life. “Online sharing. It’s time to brand the virtual world. That’s why UK-based Corporation Pop is making use of the Second Life platform providing a secure place for folk to meet and communicate. So, even when individuals are hundreds of miles apart, they can almost shake hands thanks to their virtual avatars. The environments Corporation Pop creates can be used for anything from team training and game-based learning to consultations and ceremonies. And they include nifty extras like embedded external video, as well as voice technology.”

5. Marketing Web (South Africa) – Real-world value of virtual markets. “News headlines for the past year have been dominated by the effects of the global recession. This trend has affected almost all industries, with computer gaming being one of the few exceptions. Shortly before the recession kicked in computer gaming overtook movies in entertainment spending, and was on track to surpass music too. When the recession hit it wasn’t immune, but the gaming growth curve lasted longer, and has kicked back in sooner, than many other industries. After a dismal September 2009 the industry has seen the first signs of turn-around as initial Q4 sales data is starting to come in.”

6. Wired (USA) – World of Warcraft Quests Remain Compelling, 5 Years On. “After five years, it’s hard to imagine a world without World of Warcraft. Released Nov. 23, 2004, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game has set the standard for the genre. More than 11.5 million players from around the world, from all walks of life, spend hours a day in the world of Azeroth. They embark on epic adventures, battle other players or just hang out. And each of them pays developer Blizzard Entertainment $15 per month for the privilege. Players create characters and develop them over time, forging relationships with other gamers and going on quests to gain experience or loot. Whether they play with strangers, friends or alone, Warcraft’s polished virtual world proves easy to get into and hard to get out of.”

7. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Virtual goods hit $1 bil in U.S. “The U.S. virtual goods market doubled in size from 2008, to reach $1 billion this year, according to a new report from Inside Network. “While virtual goods have been driving revenues in Asia and Europe for years, 2009 will be remembered as the year virtual goods-based businesses began to scale in the United States,” said Insight network editor Justin Smith in a statement. The size of the Asian virtual goods market reached $7 billion in 2009.”

8. The Telegraph (UK) – Advertisers pile into augmented reality. “The technology origin myths say that the Model T Ford made cars, books made e-commerce and pornography made VHS. It seems that augmented reality, which takes the real world as seen through a mobile phone camera or computer webcam and adds images, digital models and data, is to be made by advertising. Not passive advertising like billboards or television commercial breaks, where you lie back and let the spending opportunities wash over you, but active advertising that you seek out and voluntarily engage with.”

9. PsychCentral (USA) – The Proteus Effect: How Our Avatar Changes Online Behavior. “The other day, a commenter asked whether people “truly represent themselves for who they are, do they take on different personality characteristics while in their online persona, and how is their level of tolerance for disagreement affected?” One way to examine this question is to look how people provide based upon their choice of avatar — the pictorial representation of themselves in an online environment (such as virtual reality game).”

10. BBC (UK) – ‘Virtual graduation’ for students. “A university is to hold a “virtual graduation ceremony” for students on a distance learning course. Edinburgh University will broadcast the ceremony at its McEwan Hall on to the Second Life web community.
The move will ensure students on its E-Learning course who are unable to travel to Edinburgh do not miss out on the graduation celebrations. They will be able to download robes for their online avatars, and gather in a virtual bar after the ceremony.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. The Huffington Post (USA) – Real Man Traded for Cartoon Rabbit. “Getting people to change their opinion of you is tough – especially if you are a rodent who has generated billions of dollars and has become a global icon like Mickey Mouse. Mickey wasn’t Walt Disney’s first star creation, that was another big eared little mammal, Oswald the Rabbit. Oswald was taken from Walt by his employer, Universal Studios. Disney soon left Universal to start his own company. Since he didn’t have the rights to Oswald, Disney shortened and rounded Oswald’s ears and created Mickey Mouse, one of the world’s most enduring fantasy characters.”

2. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – A Wayback Machine for virtual worlds? “One of the joys of exploring virtual worlds grids is finding new fantastic new regions and builds. Then comes the pain of virtual worlds — you bring your friends back to visit, and the builds are no longer there. Maybe it cost too much to keep the region up and running, or the owners decided to put up something else, instead. As Second Life and the various OpenSim grids evolve into a true 3D Web, these early builds will become items of historical interest. It would be a shame if they all disappeared forever.”

3. San Francisco Chronicle (USA) – 3D Web will save high-performance computing industry, Intel CTO says. “Three-dimensional Web technologies will save the high-performance computing industry from its current state of financial stagnation, Intel CTO Justin Rattner predicted at the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore. Tuesday. Delivering the opening address, Rattner said the HPC market is struggling, with a compound annual growth rate of about 3.6%. Based on current trends, there is no sign of a future upswing. “This is not a healthy business,” he said. Demand for high-performance computing capability is limited to small markets, but Rattner believes that virtually the entire population can benefit from HPC if given the right platform.”

4. allmedia Scotland (Scotland) – Ready to Check Out the 3D Me? “For all the talk of Generation Y, you don’t really have to be young to ‘get’ social media. As an employer, I follow, with interest, reports about the imminent flood of hungry young workers about to transform the jobs market with all their net savvy ways. It’ll be great for business to welcome in a workforce who grew up with social networks and see the obvious benefits without the need for a seismic shift in thinking. However, there are already plenty 30 and 40-somethings who are changing mindsets and working practices to embrace new and social media. I include myself, since I am blogged-down, Tweeted-up and Facebooked-in; fluent in audio, video and other rich content, as well as the trusty, old written word. Still, though, there is one aspect of the newfangled communications I have real trouble with: virtual worlds.”

5. Gulf News (UAE) – Virtual policing: Training for Dubai Police. “Police detectives have sealed off a violent crime scene at a Dubai flat and are busy picking up clues leading to the suspect’s arrest – and they didn’t even have to open the front door. The officers are actually Dubai Police trainees playing “serious games” that digitally rebuild real crime and accident scenes from the city onto a computer screen. Be it a celebrity murder, jewellery shop robbery or a massive car crash, the police force’s virtual training and crime scene reconstruction sections put cadets in the middle of the action. The games use actual case file details like photographs, security camera footage, documents – plus three-dimensional scans of rooms or streets – to create life-like virtual worlds where cadets can “walk around” and uncover evidence.”

6. The Globe and Mail (Canada) – THE $350 MILLION PENGUIN. “The most surreal moment of Lane Merrifield’s career came on Oct. 24, 2008, when the young B.C. entrepreneur found himself standing on a stage in the middle of New York’s Times Square, surrounded by hundreds of adoring children and crowds of equally enthused parents. It was three years to the day that he and two partners-Lance Priebe and Dave Krysko-had launched Club Penguin, a virtual world where millions of preteens meet, chat and play games via 2-D penguin proxies. The three men had plenty to celebrate.”

7. news.com.au (Australia) – Virtual world opens doors for autistic. “A VIRTUAL “thinking head” generated by hi-tech computer software is teaching autistic children to recognise and respond to facial expressions. Flinders University research has found the computerised tutor helps the children improve their social skills and communicate more effectively with bullies. Children are shown facial expressions corresponding with specific emotions and are encouraged to respond.”

8. BBC (UK) – What happened to Second Life? “Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you’d be forgiven for asking if it’s still going. Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn’t plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines. Second Life is a virtual world started by the US firm Linden Lab in 2003, in which users design an avatar to live their “second life” online.”
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9. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – BigPond pulls plug on Second Life. “Telstra has decided to close its doors on Second Life, evicting the residents of its virtual BigPond Island and revoking their unmetered usage, in a move that has infuriated some subscribers. BigPond’s islands will cease to exist on December 16, signalling an end to its two-year “experiment” with Second Life, and residents of the swanky virtual Pond Estate have been given a month to relocate elsewhere.”

10. WarCry (USA) – Five Years of Warcraft: Speaking With Blizzard’s Rob Pardo. “Mega-MMO World of Warcraft turns five this month, and to celebrate, our sister site The Escapist sat down with Blizzard’s VP of Game Design, WoW mastermind Rob Pardo to chat about the lessons they’ve learned, the mistakes they’ve made, and how they’d like to beat themselves at their own game.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. Science Daily (USA) – Avatars Can Surreptitiously And Negatively Affect User In Video Games, Virtual Worlds. “Although often seen as an inconsequential feature of digital technologies, one’s self-representation, or avatar, in a virtual environment can affect the user’s thoughts, according to research by a University of Texas at Austin communication professor. In the first study to use avatars to prime negative responses in a desktop virtual setting, Jorge Peña, assistant professor in the College of Communication, demonstrated that the subtext of an avatar’s appearance can simultaneously prime negative (or anti-social) thoughts and inhibit positive (or pro-social) thoughts inconsistent with the avatar’s appearance. All of this while study participants remained unaware they had been primed. The study, co-written with Cornell University Professor Jeffrey T. Hancock and University of Texas at Austin graduate student Nicholas A. Merola, appears in the December 2009 issue of Communication Research.”

2. Computing (UK) – From ancient to virtual worlds. “he notion that your customers are only 10 seconds away from your competitor’s web site still holds true. But while the server and network infrastructure needed to deliver a web site that stays up 99.999 per cent of the time is one aspect of delivering a good online experience, the phrase “content is king” is equally relevant, and just as important for customer retention. Would a better way to engage customers be by spicing up that dowdy site with some visually stunning graphics, tied into standard e-commerce transaction middleware? For visually stunning graphics, read virtual worlds, whose genesis can be traced back to the multi-user dungeon program MUD, which originated in 1978 at Essex University. But it was many years before what people now think of as a virtual world was realised – a 3D, immersive world, available 24/7 via a web connection.”

3. Financial Times (UK) – Habbo Hotel creators hope to welcome older users. “Creators of virtual worlds and other online communities are hoping their members will continue to pay for digital goods as they grow older. Sulake , a private Finnish company, is hoping to build on its success with Habbo Hotel, a virtual world visited by 14m teenagers every month, with a new mobile version for young adults, Bobba Bar . The application, launching today on Nokia and Apple smartphones, is only available to over-17s. It allows members to create a unique digital character and chat to other avatars in themed rooms, such as sports, technology or “romance”.”

4. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Kid Command Set For Launch. “Today, Collin Caneva will take his Kid Command virtual world live. The world, targeted to kids and tweens, hopes to instill an appreciation of the environment and world’s fragile eco-system. As the growth of virtual worlds, social networks and web-based entertainment explodes, Omaha-based Caneva hopes to carve out a special place in that digital eco-system that will taps kids’ curiosity and innate intelligence, talking up to their intellect rather than down.”

5. The Economic Times (India) – Endgame for reality. “Technology, like much else in life, seems to come with a built-in ‘dual use’ possibility. Take computers, and all else associated with them: the internet, gaming et al. There is, of course, the information revolution, the educational benefits, or just plain downright entertainment that comes with this. And then there’s the dark side. The world of pervasive online porn, of cyber terrorists, of even computers or the net so taking over people’s lives as to over-rule the real. A recent report has it that among the plethora of existing execrable violent games , which seem to have legions of addicts across the globe, a new one is based on the ‘raping skills’ of players. ”

6. Techdirt (USA) – Virtual Goods, Scams, Investigative Reporting And The Media. “For many years, we’ve been quite skeptical of any business model in virtual worlds/social networks that rely on “buying virtual goods.” That’s because these are all based on artificial scarcities, and as we all know (hopefully, by now), relying on artificial scarcities for a business model is incredibly risky, especially once people realize the scarcities are artificial. And yet, over the past few years, a number of businesses have been built on this very premise. In fact, Silicon Valley is crawling these days with businesses built on selling virtual goods, and if you talk to many VCs about it, you’ll quickly note that they’re positively giddy over the fact that people are paying for this stuff. What they don’t seem to realize is that it’s unlikely to last. ”

7. Business Standard (India) – Virtual classrooms go commercial. “Ramesh Thorat (not his real name) is at home. But sitting on his computer, he is intently watching and listening to a lecture on the internet. He has a broadband connection, a webcam and even a microphone to interact with the lecturer if he has any question. In fact, Thorat is one of the many engineering graduates from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT) who studies in a “virtual classroom” called “kPoint”. Developed by Pune-based Great Software Laboratory Pvt Ltd (GS Lab), this virtual classroom tool “kPoint” is a concept which is fast catching up in the city. It has been successfully deployed at outsourced product development (OPD) firm Persistent Systems, too, to train newly-recruited engineering graduates at its Nagpur campus from its parent facility in Pune.”

8. CBS News (USA) – Scams Target Gamers on Social Sites. “Farmville, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City are Internet-based games that can be played on sites like Facebook, where millions of people have signed up. But click on the wrong places in these virtual worlds, and you could lose real money without ever knowing it. CBS News Science and Technology Correspondent Daniel Sieberg reported where there’s a popular online trend like these games, advertisers are sure to follow. But the legitimate ads aren’t the problem — it’s the ones that promise a free trinket or virtual cash to be used in your game. And if you’re tricked into clicking, they start draining your money.”

9. Information Week (USA) – Second Life Steps Into The Enterprise. “Second Life is attracting a cult following among businesses, who say the virtual world gives them richer collaboration than teleconference calls or video conferences. But Second Life still has limitations that pose barriers to enterprise adoption. Ericsson has become the first vendor to prove end to end interoperability in TD-LTE, another standard of 4G radio technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks. One of the major limitations is that Linden Lab, which developed and operates Second Life, runs the service on its own server farms. This software-as-a-service model creates problems for user control and confidentiality of sensitive conversations.”

10. The Korea Herald (South Korea) – Second Life withdraws from Korean market. “The virtual world community game Second Life has effectively withdrawn from the local market.
According to industry sources, the U.S.-based developer of Second Life, Linden Lab, failed to extend the contract with the local game company Barunson Games Corp. Barunson was first contracted to operate Second Life services in Korea in October 2007. However, the Korean Second Life community Sera Korea will continue to be serviced. Linden Lab’s official position is said to be temporarily closing local operations. However, the company is reported to have no plans to revive the operations as yet.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. CNN (UK) – Virtual businesses: Going to the office in Second Life. “As travel budgets are squeezed and slashed in the recession, companies are increasingly seeking innovative ways of bringing employees together for conferences and meetings remotely. Virtual community Second Life is seeking to tap into that market by creating a new tool that allows businesses to have virtual meetings on their own computer networks. The company’s Enterprise tool will let employees’ avatars — animated alter egos — meet in virtual worlds from the privacy of a company’s own network, rather than the public networks used in standard Second Life. That extra security could encourage more companies to take up the technology.”

2. Boston Globe (USA) – To build up real business selling virtual goods, firms change tactics. “ust after Labor Day last year, Pano Anthos flew out to San Francisco to unveil his new start-up, Hangout Industries Inc., at a major technology conclave, the TechCrunch50. It was an opportunity to show off the three-dimensional virtual environment his Boston company had been working on, intended to attract young Internet users and allow them to deck out online rooms with all sorts of branded merchandise – some of which they might also decide to buy in the real world. Then, they could invite friends over to socialize. Hangout, Anthos told the crowd, would combine some of the best elements of MySpace and Facebook, the two massive social networks, and The Sims, a popular video game. After his presentation, Anthos got feedback – much of it positive – from a panel of on-stage experts that included Marissa Mayer, a senior executive at Google, and Ron Conway, one of the investors who bankrolled the search company in its earliest days.”

3. Reuters (USA) – Can Virtual Worlds Provide Support to Military Amputees? “Virtual worlds can provide military amputees with an opportunity to enhance their overall quality of life, expedite their reintegration into society, and improve their physical and mental wellness. ADL Company Inc. (ADL) and Virtual Ability, Inc. (VAI) announced today the start of a project to establish best practices and protocols for the provision of on-line peer-to-peer support services to this community, with funding from the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) of the US Army Medical Research and Materiel
Command (USAMRMC). “For individuals with disabilities, virtual worlds are a powerful way to connect with others, to access peer support, and to participate in activities that might not otherwise be possible,” said Alice Krueger, President of Virtual Ability, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation. “This project will establish the best way to adopt this technology for the unique needs of the military amputee community.”

4. New York Times (USA) – Virtual Estates Lead to Real-World Headaches. “Two avatars, Leto Yoshiro and Enchant Jacques, met in the virtual world of Second Life in 2005. They married online the same year and built a house together on an island they had brought out of the waves that covered much of that world. In real life, Leto was a film producer from Michigan, Enchant an accountant from England. In 2008, after three years together for the couple, several real-life encounters and thousands of hours logged in, Leto died of liver failure while awaiting a transplant. About six months later, the island where they had lived, along with everything on it, was erased under the terms of service that Leto had signed with Linden Lab, the company that created the platform for Second Life. It had been bought in his name in Linden dollars — on Friday, $1 bought 259 Linden — and Enchant decided she could not pay the fees to maintain it. All that remains are a few objects of which she had copies.”

5. New Scientist (USA) – How your brain sees virtual you. “As players who stay up all night fighting imaginary warriors demonstrate, slipping into the skin of an avatar, and inhabiting a virtual world can be riveting stuff. But to what extent does your brain regard your virtual self as you? Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem to behave similarly when someone is thinking about their virtual self as when they think about their real one.”

6. VentureBeat (USA) – Max Levchin on Slide’s big virtual goods bet, scams and — mating. “Slide, which started in photo-sharing, moved into Facebook widgets and then raised funding at a reported $550 million valuation last year, shifted gears this year and went aggressively into virtual goods. The company’s looking to become a mainstream version of Second Life, where there’s a virtual economy at work of real people buying and selling goods. Instead of churning out new apps like many of its competitors, the company has focused its existing ones — including seven on Facebook like SuperPoke, Top Friends and FunSpace, with about 27 million users between them. Slide introduced a virtual currency into its SuperPoke! Pets application, where you can raise and care for a virtual pet. You can earn gold through the game or you can purchase 10 pieces of Slide Gold for $1.”

7. Massively (USA) – Exclusive interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon. “Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab’s CEO, has been a bit of a mystery figure since his appointment about a year and a half ago. While he has not been uncommunicative, it’s been hard to get a very good sense of the man at the helm of Linden Lab, his passions, interests and direction. We were very pleased, therefore, when he took the time to sit down with us and answer a whole grab-bag of questions, about himself, about Linden Lab, and – of course – about Second Life. Bear with us, because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

8. Kotaku (USA) – Visually Impaired Gamer Sues Sony. “GameSpot reports that a man has sued Sony, Sony Online Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment of America, contending the company violates the Americans with Disabilities Act for not making its virtual worlds more easily navigable by the visually impaired.”

9. Data Center Knowledge (USA) – Virtual Goods and the Cost of Infrastructure. “In an economy built atop virtual goods, how do you manage capacity and sort out whether the business model is able to pay for the infrastructure required to power it? That’s an important questionas as virtual item purchases become a key revenue stream for fast-growing social networking platforms like Facebook. Managed hosting specialist GNi, which offers an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) hosting platform for online games, offers a window into the evolving infrastructure requirements of virtual economies. In the U.S., popular understanding of online gaming has been shaped by the popularity of World of Warcraft and other virtual worlds that generate through monthly subscription fees. That approach is increasingly yielding to a “free-to-play” business model.”

10. TechCrunch Europe (Germany) – 20 years on, explore the Berlin Wall in Twinity’s virtual Berlin. “With only days away from the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, how best to mark the occasion? Rebuild it or at least a virtual two kilometer stretch. That’s the approach being taken by Metaversum, the Berlin-based company behind virtual world Twinity, who have constructed a replica section of the wall in-world. Visitors to Twinity’s virtual Berlin will be able to travel back to 1989 to explore a two km-long, true-to-scale section of the Berlin Wall, from the Reichstag, past the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, ending with a realistic replica of Checkpoint Charlie. Along with the wall itself, visitors can also access various multimedia content, including video and audio guides at seven key points describing the building of the wall, important dates in its history, witness accounts and, of course, the climatic events of 1989. The exhibition is a collaboration between Metaversum, the Berlin Senate and media partner Berlin.de.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. The Hindu (India) – Brave new worlds beckon. “Everyone has indulged in a little escapism sometime in their lives. The need for an outlet from the relentless glare of reality is felt by many and the possibility of an alternate lifestyle hidden from public view can be a powerful attraction. This a lternate role-play starts at childhood with girls playing make-believe games with dolls and boys dreaming up war games with their action heroes. As age advances, the need for fantasy it seems, does not always diminish, it sometimes gets hidden under the wraps. In the past, people’s fantasy world went as far as books or movies could take them. Today the Internet can transport you to worlds beyond your wildest imagination.”

2. TechCrunch (USA) – PlaySpan Strikes Deal With Nickelodeon To Power Microtransactions. “We just wrote about PlaySpan’s recent study showing positive growth in the exchange and e-commerce of virtual goods exchange. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site. Today, PlaySpan is announcing a fairly significant deal with Nickelodeon to power payment services for virtual goods and microtransactions for the Nickelodeon Kids and Family Virtual Worlds Group.”

3. PhyOrg.com (UK) – Researchers bring noise to virtual worlds. “When you kick over a garbage can, it doesn’t make a pure, musical tone. That’s why the sound is so hard to synthesize. But now Cornell computer scientists have developed a practical method to generate the crashing and rumbling sounds of objects made up of thin “harmonic shells,” including the sounds of cymbals, falling garbage cans and lids, and plastic water-cooler bottles and recycling bins. The work by graduate students Jeffrey Chadwick and Steven An and Doug James, associate professor of computer science, will be presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Yokohama, Japan, in December.”

4. CNET (USA) – Virtual-goods resellers on the rise. “Gamers are not just making purchases to enhance their gaming experience but also selling virtual assets to other players, according to new research from video game market research firm VGMarket.
Sales of virtual goods are expected to reach $1 billion this year and already generate near $4 billion annually in China. But there are some challenges, primarily the fact that once you convert your real money to virtual cash you can’t readily get the dough back out.”

5. The Guardian (UK) – Google Earth beware: the Brits are coming. “I intended to give the 3D internet a miss for a while after writing last week. But that was before Mike Fotoohi, a freelance software engineer from London, emailed me. When he told me that he and a few friends, working for five years in their spare time, had built a 3D version not just of capital cities, as others have, but of the entire planet that was better than Google Earth, my first reaction was to get off the phone pronto.”

6. Reuters (USA) – Shapiro Negotiations Institute Opens New Training Centers Inside the Sistine Chapel, at the North Pole, at Camden Yards, and on Mt. Everest. “Shapiro Negotiations Institute (SNI) today launched a new online, 3-D approach to corporate training and education that delivers dramatic results and has the potential to change perceptions and expectations of such programs worldwide. Virtual Training Partners moves the experience of learning from conference rooms to the online, virtual world of Second Life, where participants and instructors interact as avatars in dynamic, ever-changing environments. The result? A program that costs dramatically less to provide, avoids lengthy time out of the office, and delivers effective new skills for participants that can be implemented immediately. ”

7. The Straits Times (Singapore) – Street cred in a virtual world. “I AM a midnight voyeur. But it’s not what you are thinking. Not the type that stares out of the window in the middle of the night, through high-powered goggles, searching for live porn action. My time is spent flipping through the profiles of my friends on Xbox LIVE – the online part of the Xbox 360 game console, which among other things, lets me connect to my friends and challenge them to virtual death matches. And this I usually do at the stroke of 12, which is when I get my free time in my daily busy working schedule. What I am looking for? Xbox Achievement points.”

8. VentureBeat (USA) – China’s growing addiction: online farming games. “A new agrarian revolution has occured in China, but only in the virtual worlds of social games. Social farm games now dominate all major Chinese social networking sites — RenRen (formerly Xiaonei), Kaixin001, 51.com, and QQ’s QZone. The May launch and 2H 2009 adoption of QQ Farm — a version of China’s already popular Happy Farm game built to run on Tencent’s estimated 228 million active-user QZone platform — may very well have transformed China into the leading country of online farmers. According to Five Minutes, Shanghai-based game developer of the first and largest social farm game, Happy Farm has now surpassed 23 million daily active users (DAU) across QZone, RenRen, and 51.com.The DAU count is the total number of users who log in during a 24-hour period.”

9. The Guardian (UK) – The rise of urban gaming. “Although we’d all like to think that we can completely separate our virtual and real-world experiences, it’s never quite as simple as that. Who hasn’t, at one point or another, emerged from a ten-hour Counter Strike session only to scour the street for camping spots? And conversely, surely you’ve had moments where you spot a cool building or rundown industrial area and think, ‘that would make a hell of game level’. I think, through the omnipresence of game culture and conventions, and the growing popularity of virtual worlds in general, our sense of reality is becoming more plastic; our interactions with the world around us more playful. I don’t think parkour could have evolved in a pre-videogame world – it’s games that have taught us to see scenic objects as potentially interactive components. ”

10. Christian Today (USA) – Brick-and-mortar pastor defends virtual churches. “The Christian church is engaging far less than one per cent of the 70 million people who are active in the virtual world. This means the virtual world is by far the largest unreached people group on planet Earth, says one pastor. Douglas Estes, a pastor from San Jose, California, has no vested interest in virtual or internet churches – a relatively new phenomenon – but given the large “unreached” population on the internet, he says he has a desire to see healthy churches proliferate “regardless of context”. Although he leads a brick and mortar church – Berryessa Valley Church – Estes defends virtual churches against critics in his new book, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World, maintaining that they are real churches with real people.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. Business in Vancouver (Canada) – Virtual worlds now delivering genuine business opportunities. “As video games, social networks and virtual worlds increasingly star as stand-ins for reality, development shops are exploring new ways to monetize fantasy by creating virtual marketplaces replete with digitized goods and services. Fuelled by micro-transactions in which users buy virtual goods and services for as little as pennies, virtual marketplaces are not only driving user engagement for technology companies, but also adding new revenue streams. During a recent panel discussion at the Mobile Monday Vancouver event, where local Internet entrepreneurs gather monthly, roughly 90 attendees heard how B.C. companies are monetizing virtual goods.”

2. Gamasutra (USA) – The Effects of Imaginary Value in Real Virtual Worlds. “Like, I feel, a large portion of my generation, most of my learning has been through books or the internet. I think that’s helped, or maybe forced, me to parse through things logically. And an unexpected outcome of pushing myself to write more is that I find out what I really think about something when I’m forced to type out the facts and read them back to myself. So with that preface, I’ve been trying to figure out why I like Warhammer Online. In a previous post I think I gave the impression that it was a nostalgia fix, and it is to some extent. But sheer nostalgia shouldn’t hold my interest like this, so there must be something more concrete here that’s affecting me. It’s confusing because I think I’m done with the MMO. WoW was my first, and I hopped on that bandwagon right away out of Warcraft fandom. I deposited years into that beast, and I don’t entirely regret it. But after WoW I was worn out — never again would I trudge through a world so huge that I was made as powerless as I am in the real world. Because in reality I’m in the lower tax echelon, work all day and don’t own a badass axe.”

3. New York TImes (USA) – No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You. “IT may be raining pink slips, and some people may be hard-pressed to make the rent, much less splash out on a pagoda-shoulder jacket from Balmain, but Vixie Rayna is hardly feeling the pinch. Not a month goes by in which she isn’t spending as much as $50,000 on housing, furniture or her special weakness: multistrap platform sandals, tricked out in feathers and beads. Recession or no, Ms. Rayna isn’t reining in her fantasies, or her expenditures — at least not in the virtual world. In a simulated universe like There.com, IMVU.com or Second Life.com, the granddaddy of avatar-driven social networking sites, Ms. Rayna, an avatar on Second Life, and her free-spending cohort can quaff Champagne, teleport to private islands and splurge on luxury brands that are the cyber equivalent of Prada waders or a Rolex watch.”

4. The Guardian (UK) – The real-world boom in online cities. “The internet has been evolving into three dimensions for years without most people noticing. The change has been confined to niche activities, even though some – such as World of Warcraft or Second Life – are big niches. Now there is a worldwide move to bring the 3D web to a mass market, led by the building of “virtual” cities where avatars can walk, shop, club or whatever with links to “real life” activities. From Tokyo to Helsinki and from Paris to Philadelphia, cities are being constructed at a pace that recalls 19th-century railway mania; except, mercifully, it is a lot cheaper and won’t have serious economic effects if there is a crash. ”

5. New York Times (USA) – A Virtual Clinic to Treat the Stresses of War. “Many veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious problems, like post-traumatic stress disorder, but only one-third get medical help. One researcher has built a healing center for veterans in a virtual world, where she hopes they will be more comfortable seeking care. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is a senior researcher at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. She formerly did animation for Disney. She calls her current project, which she presented at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Coming Home.”

6. INSEAD Knowledge – Capitalism thrives in virtual world: Second Life gives commerce a second chance. “In the beginning, the online virtual world was a place for action video games such as Grand Theft Auto, or hanging out and chatting. Today, it’s a very different place. Commerce and capitalism have entered the picture. “A big change happened when the virtual worlds decided to give ownership to assets (there), which gave rise to an interesting and thriving economy,” says Miklos Sarvary, the new Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD and creator of the school’s campus in a virtual world called Second Life.”

7. VentureBeat (USA) – With 3 million fans, Fantage formally launches virtual world for kids. “While many kids virtual worlds have come and gone, Fantage has quietly built an audience of 3 million registered users. Today, it is formally launching its web site. The company has managed to do what lots of other kids sites have failed to do: get an audience by offering fun games and social activities in a safe, parent-friendly setting. And they did so just by observing kids, building what they like, and starting over when things didn’t work, said Peter Bae, vice president of marketing, in an interview.”

8. InformationWeek (USA) – Is There A Business In The Virtual World? “Much has been made of the premature obituaries for Second Life, but while the virtual world manufactured by Linden Labs has prevailed long beyond its presumed expiration date, the business model seems too arcane and forbidding to inspire many imitators. His unprecedented ability to manipulate individual atoms signaled a quantum leap forward in in nanoscience experimentation and heralded in the age of nanotechnology. After all, a business that depends on writing dauntingly complex code running on giant server farms to lure users to a bandwidth-hogging digitized playscape where they can flirt or do business — all in the hopes that they will purchase so-called “in-world” Linden Dollars using actual American dollars for the privilege of purchasing pink see-through blouses and imaginary islands — is a little bit daunting to say the least.”

9. Financial Times (UK) – Social games to change the world? “Social games are oft criticised for being little more than drivel. It’s a fair charge. After all, there’s not much intellectual value in games like Sorority Life and Mob Wars. Nonetheless, they have become among the most popular activities for users of social networks. Zynga, the largest maker of social games, says it has 50m daily active users of its various games, most of those on Facebook. In turn, Zynga is raking in cash through the sale of virtual goods.”

10. Huffington Post (USA) – Augmented Reality: Here to Stay. “There’s a new phrase around town — “Augmented Reality.” For a period of time, Virtual Reality (VR) was the hot new thing. Folks could create avatars, pretend to be other people, and buy and sell ‘virtual’ goods. You know, fake stuff. But alas, for most of us, there was just too much to get done in our daily lives to allow us to vanish into the ‘virtual worlds’ of Second Life or such. But now the combination of the web and technologists seem to have found a way to bring the ‘virtual’ world of the web into the real world of our daily lives. And shockingly – it’s pretty darn helpful.”

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. The Guardian (UK) – Are online currencies striking gold? “Money. The stuff that makes the world go round. Every day we earn it, spend it, exchange it and lose it. But you won’t find any Linden dollars, Eve ISK or Facebook credits down the back of the couch. Virtual currencies like these are used for transactions in online worlds and social networking sites. While real-world currencies are on the slide, many virtual ones are going from strength to strength. In the second quarter of the year the equivalent of $144m (£91m) was traded on the LindeX, the official currency exchange of Second Life, where residents buy and sell Linden dollars for their US counterpart – a 20% increase on the previous quarter, while the US economy shrank by 1%. Trading activity increased by 6% in the last quarter of 2008.”

2. Financial Times (UK) – Trading in online virtual goods set to top $1bn. “Revenues from the sale of virtual goods will top $1bn this year in the US, according to analysts, a 100 per cent leap over last year that signals the arrival of a new online industry in the largest internet market in the western world. The findings, to be released in a report today, show that sales are expected to double again next year, with particularly fast growth noticeable in the social games category. Analysts and entrepreneurs have been following developments in virtual goods and social games closely. But the report will give the most complete picture to date of virtual goods sales trends in the US.”

3. VentureBeat (USA) – Electronic Arts exec says social gaming bubble resembles mobile games hype. “The social gaming bubble is getting bigger and it resembles all of the hype that used to envelop the mobile phone games and virtual world markets a few years ago. So says John Schappert, the newly appointed chief operating officer at Electronic Arts. When EA agreed to buy Jamdat Mobile for $680 million in December, 2005, that was a peak moment for the mobile games bubble. Venture capitalists funded lots of mobile game startups in the hopes of getting a similar outcome, only to see the peak shift to virtual worlds as Second Life.”

4. Signal Magazine (USA) – Virtual Design Challenge Opens To All. “A new competition is opening up the process of developing and improving virtual training environments by streamlining the rules and requirements for participation. The U.S. military spends billions of dollars developing and improving virtual environments to train its personnel, but this process can seem complex and difficult for individuals and firms without government contracting experience.”

5. Reuters – China Q2 online game revenues hit $906 mln -research firm. “Revenue from China’s online game market grew 39.5 percent in the second quarter from the previous year to 6.18 billion yuan ($906 million), according to data from research firm Analysys International on Tuesday. Tencent Holdings (0700.HK), which runs China’s largest online messaging platform and operates popular free-to-play games domestically, emerged as the market leader with 20.2 percent of the market and 1.24 billion yuan in revenues.”

6. Computerworld (USA) – Linden Lab CEO on Second Life’s growth, future. “While the recession has been brutal on most technology companies, one venture that has done relatively well is Linden Lab, the parent company of Second Life. When we first interviewed CEO Mark Kingdon in January, he said the company was profitable and growing. Last month, Linden Lab released figures showing increased usage of the virtual world, and a near doubling of the size of the in-world economy. The Standard recently caught up with Kingdon via email to see how the company’s enterprise push is faring.”

7. MTV.com (USA) – Project Natal May Provide Dance Controls, But ‘FaceAPI’ Could Let You Talk Or Make Out. “From what Microsoft has shown off so far, Project Natal looks like it will track various body movements for controls dealing with first-person shooters, sports games and maybe even lightsaber fights. PhD candidate Torben Sko, is concentrating on face movements in his work right now, though, and he says he’s found a way to track mouths, eyes and head movements nothing nothing more than a camera. “Using a program called ‘FaceAPI,’ it’s possible to track a person’s facial features using nothing more than a standard Web camera,” he explains in a video posted to TorbenSko.com. “In turn, we can use this information to drive the expression of a virtual character.”

8. Air and Business Travel News (UK) – Comparing real and virtual meetings. “In a bid to compare the virtual and real life, the UK and Ireland Institute of Travel and Meetings (ITM) and Eventia held two events, one a real meeting at the NEC in Birmingham, the other in the virtual reality computer programme Second Life. The same content was included in both events, held on September 22 and 23, after which the delegates were asked to complete a survey about their experience. The two meetings organisations wanted to use the events to test out the business viability of Second Life technology. After comparing the feedback, ITM and Eventia recently released the results of the experiment to be mixed.”

9. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Teen net addicts at risk of mental health problems. “Obsessive use of the internet could create a mental-health epidemic, with up to 10 per cent of adolescents at risk, a Sydney academic warns. World studies have documented dangerous levels of “internet addiction” – computer use that interferes with daily lives – says Lawrence Lam, a behavioural epidemiologist at the University of Sydney and the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.”

10. World Politics Review (USA) – Social Media, Virtual Worlds and Public Diplomacy. “On Sept. 1, 2009, the new U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Michael E. Ranneberger, a career foreign service officer with deep experience on the African continent, started a Twitter feed. The seven or so tweets he posted between then and Sept. 29 were lauded as another example of “Twitter Diplomacy.” Shashank Bengali, blogging for McClatchy, declared that the ambassador came out “swinging” with highly charged comments about Kenyan presidential appointees and in support of Kenya’s need for reform.”

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