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.”
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