1. New Scientist (USA) – Online law man: Virtual worlds need real laws. “Tens of millions of people live, work and play in virtual worlds where anything goes. Greg Lastowka thinks we need to police these lawless frontiers. What prompted you to write your new book, Virtual Justice? I’ve always been interested in technology law, and the issues surrounding law in virtual worlds are like canaries in a coal mine. Society is increasingly migrating to the internet, and virtual worlds are an intense version of that. The issues that arise in virtual worlds will ultimately filter through to broader society.”

2. TechCrunch (USA) – Blue Mars Looks To OTOY’s Clouds To Take 3D Worlds Mainstream. “3D online virtual worlds are nothing new. From World of Warcraft to Second Life, people have been wandering across polygonal terrain for years, chatting with other users, selling their virtual wares, and making their avatars wave at each other for no apparent reason. But Avatar Reality, the startup behind a 3D platform called Blue Mars, thinks that there’s still a lot of untapped potential from 3D. And now it may have a way to turn their dream into something a lot of people are actually using.”

3. VentureBeat (USA) – Hip Venture abandons virtual world to pivot into social games (exclusive)
. “There’s a stampede going on. Publishers of virtual worlds are moving on to better things, or they’re perishing. Usually, that means they’re pivoting into the hot markets of social and mobile games. That explains the announcement today by virtual world maker Hip Venture that it will shift its focus to making social and mobile games. Previously, Hip Venture planned on creating a virtual world for tweens (older kids who are just shy of their teen years) with a Latino perspective. Now the company is repositioning its HipChicas.com virtual world so it can pursue the bigger market of social and mobile games. The New York-based company is adding new titles, new technology and key advisors to execute on its new strategy and will continue to focus on the US Hispanic, Latin American and Spanish markets. It plans to publish games on social networks such as Facebook, Orkut and Hi5 or mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPad, and Droid. Its first game, HipChicas, will debut in the first quarter of 2011 and will be followed up with games based on popular Latino toy and book brands such as Homies, Mijoes, Hacienda, Bodeguita, and Hospital.”

4. Scope (USA) – Collaborative project creates a virtual world for cancer patients. “The pain and isolation of dealing with a cancer diagnosis are challenging emotional experiences for adults. Now imagine getting that diagnosis as an adolescent. But a new collaborative effort initiated by Mette Hoybye, PhD, a visiting scholar at the Center on Stress and Health, and Henrik Bennetsen, chief executive officer and co-founder of Katalabs, aims to fuse cancer therapy with virtual worlds to provide a learning space for young cancer patients. The project, which is aimed at patients ages 13 to 24, is called BE Community.”

5. Forbes (USA) – Meet The Man Who Just Made A Cool Half Million From The Sale Of Virtual Property. “Many people might balk at the idea of paying even a dollar for virtual cow in a game like Farmville. But Jon Jacobs has just sold a virtual space station he’s spent the past five years managing for a whopping $635,000 in total, making over half a million dollars. Who would devote so much time and investment into something that doesn’t exist in the real world?”

6. The Christian Post (USA) – Democratizing Evangelism in an eWorld. “Outreach in the electronic world is needed as people become increasingly dependent on technology to communicate, said Christian thinkers at a conference focused on the subject this week. While the good news should never change, methodologies used to communicate the message must change with the times, agreed attendees of the Great Commission Research Network’s annual conference, which concluded Thursday. The conference, titled “Outreach in an eWorld,” focused on how the average, local church can use the electronic medium to share the Good News. “The electronic medium is becoming a more powerful tool for good or for bad,” said Bob Whitesel, president of the Great Commission Research Network, to The Christian Post Thursday. “And the Church needs to know how to wield it for good and it needs to know how to take a stand against the bad.”

7. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – The hypergrid’s not for everyone. “Ever since Crista Lopes, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine invented the hypergrid in 2009, people have been debating whether grids should be on or off the hypergrid. On the one hand, the hypergrid is very cool. You can teleport from one grid to another, hopping around like a grasshopper, picking up some freebies here, buying some clothes there, attending a meeting somewhere else, all with one avatar and a single inventory. On the other hand, hypergrid allows people to take content from one grid to another — and to harass people on other grids, as well. Some grids hedge their bets. They turn hypergrid on just during open houses, or during the construction phase. Or they only allow hypergrid to certain regions of their grid, and keep the rest private.”

8. The Quad News (USA) – Living in a Virtual Reality. “In 2007 seven individuals bought an island and embarked on a mission to create a place in which individuals could overcome religious differences and learn to live together—all in a virtual world.
The community, which is called, Al-Andalus was created using the online, 3D digital platform called Second Life. Second Life was founded and is now run by Linden Lab which is located in San Francisco, Calif. It is similar to other computer games, like the Sims, except for one large difference. In Second Life, every tree, every house, every shop, and every subway line is created by the people, or Avatars, playing the game–it is a virtual world created solely by the user.
One of the founders of A1-Andalus, just one of the dozens of communities that exist in Second Life, “Rose Springvale,” is a mother of two, an attorney and a wife to a CEO husband in the real world. ”

9. VentureBeat (USA) – Social entertainment world IMVU expands to Europe. “Social entertainment firm IMVU is launching a big expansion in Europe today as it unveils new versions in seven languages. With IMVU, users create their own 3D character, or avatar, and can then meet people, chat, create virtual goods and share them, and play games. The company is one of the few surviving virtual world startups that have grown a big audience and generated a lot of revenue. Keeping the growth going isn’t easy. But the European expansion should help. IMVU will now have localized versions in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The launch will start with a Swedish version, and the other six languages will roll out in the coming weeks. The company plans to continue its international expansion into 2011, said IMVU chief executive Cary Rosenzweig.”

10. Asharq Al-Awsat (UK) – The Virtual Hajj Experience. “It is now possible for every Muslim to learn how to perform the Hajj or Umrah rituals correctly through the online virtual world of “Second Life” before physically embarking on this spiritual journey in real life. It is now possible for people to learn how to perform the Hajj rituals by virtually visiting Mecca, Medina, and the other holy sites that must be visited as part of Hajj after the “Islam Online” website recently introduced an educational hajj program on the virtual world of “Second Life.” This project also aims to reduce the common errors made by many pilgrims. Hisham Jaafar, Editor-in -Chief of the “Islam Online” website told Asharq Al-Awsat that “Hajj Island” on Second Life includes a complete three dimensional representation of The Grand Mosque in Mecca following its recent development and enlargement. “Hajj Island” also allows users to travel between the Safah and Marawah hills, as well as visit Mina where “the stoning of the devil” ritual is performed. In order to simulate the rituals as realistically as possible, the model also includes the newly-built Royal Mecca Clock Tower, which overlooks the Grand Mosque, and is the largest clock-tower in the world. There will also be a virtual train linking Mina and Mount Arafat, with this train set to operate this year for the first time.”

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.”