1. LiveScience (USA) – Motion Sickness in Virtual Worlds. “If the idea of spinning carnival rides, reading in a car, or sitting through a 3-D movie makes you sick to your stomach, then Frederick Bonato is your new best friend. Bonato, an experimental psychologist at Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J., studies all forms of motion sickness including cybersickness – a phenomenon that occurs in virtual reality environments such as those displayed by 3-D movies. Bonato knows first-hand the pain you suffer and is dedicated to solving this problem so you can travel, read, and enjoy Avatar more comfortably.”

2. Armed With Science (USA) – Three Ways Virtual Reality Can Improve Military Training. “Efficiency of flight simulators has improved since they first appeared in the 1930s. My first flight as a commercial airline pilot was with a full passenger load because the fidelity of the flight simulator made the training so realistic that it didn’t require aircraft flight hours. We now have a similar capability available for a far broader training and education spectrum. We can now use virtual environments to train more efficiently or in environments that are too dangerous to recreate. The key to this training is a realistic immersion. You need to feel like you are present in the environment. The virtual environment provides the immersion and the scalability is drastically improved. An example of the scalability is a base exercise which is generally limited to a portion of the base. The reason for the limit is due to some portion of the mission needing to continue. However, if a weapon of mass destruction were to be used in a large city it would likely effect large portions of multiple bases (like Joint Base San Antonio). We can use a virtual environment to train such a cataclysmic event. AETC is testing large-scale exercise scenarios in a virtual environment by building the Joint Base San Antonio command post.”

3. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Realtime Worlds Announces Project: MyWorld. “Developer Realtime Worlds is entering the virtual worlds business with its latest project, a 3D world with social features called Project: MyWorld. This world uses map information from GIS services to create 3D renders of entire countries. Users can then edit the procedurally generated data using special in-game tools. The suggested use is to make buildings more closely mimic real world counterparts and Realtime Worlds is actually going to attempt to enforce a sense of realism.”

4. Philadelphia Inquirer (USA) – Second Life avatars give disabled at Inglis House new experiences. “In the blockbuster movie Avatar, lead character Jake Sully, a paralyzed military veteran, wakes up in a virtual body to find that he can stand and run and dig his toes into the earth, which he does with animated abandon. “This is great,” Sully says as he disconnects himself from medical equipment and stumbles out of a laboratory. It is great – and not just for Jake. The ability to create a cyber version of yourself has been embraced by people with disabilities stemming from arthritis, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, mental illness, and other debilitating conditions. They log on to virtual worlds, Second Life chief among them, to do things they cannot, or are afraid to, do in real life. Can’t go places without a wheelchair? In Second Life, you not only can walk, you can fly. Is your speech slurred? In Second Life, text chats can let out your inner Shakespeare.”

5. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – ReactionGrid discontinues $25 region hosting. “ReactionGrid no longer offers $25 regions, offering only entire servers starting at $150 a month, with a $500 setup fee. Each server can handle four regions, and there is a discount for educators — to $75 a region with a $220 setup fee. “The price for a $75 four-sim dedicated server actually works out to less than $25 per sim should users decide to go that route,” ReactionGrid CEO Kyle Gomboy told Hypergrid Business. According to Gomboy, the company has decided to focus on dedicated server deployments and the Jibe platform, which is accessible via the Web. Those looking to rent individual regions can go through a reseller, Gomboy said, but declined to provide any names. “If you hang out on the ReactionGrid community you will find many educators and others there who have the lower priced single sim options,” he said. “[But] I do not know the specifics of what each partner offers so from our perspective we’d rather not say you can get any particular level of hosting from a partner.”

6. The Jakarta Globe (Indonesia) – Gamers at Risk of Virtual Addiction. “Back in 2002, then-seventh-grader Surya Santoso was spending six to seven hours at a time playing “Nexia,” his favorite online game. The game, the first massive multiplayer online role playing game to hit Indonesia, was enormously popular when it debuted that year. “During those years, it was almost like my life revolved around the virtual world of my avatar, the mage Nonamushi,” he recalls. “I was obsessed with increasing my character’s power to heal and to attack, to the point where I often forgot to eat and sleep. I wanted to stop, but my mind always persuaded me: ‘Just one more level, just one more step.’ ” Now a university student, Surya has vowed never to touch another online game because he knows how casual curiosity can lead to a destructive cycle of addiction. ”

7. Thanh Nienh Daily (Vietnam) – Game over! . “Vietnamese authorities are poised to issue a stringent crackdown on the online gaming industry. Authorities claim that the move is aimed at protecting the nation’s youth from perceived social ills. Critics of the measures have decried them as unfeasible and unwise. On July 16, the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee, the municipal administration, submitted a proposal to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung asking that he tighten the screws on online gaming. In the request, the city government noted that the number of licensed online games has increased from only two in 2006 to more than 65 today. The city hall claimed that 43 of the currently licensed games are violent in nature. The city government proposed a halt on the importation of new online games and an end to their advertisement “in any form.” It further proposed that all new games be screened for violent, gambling or pornographic content. All existing licenses should be re-evaluated; those that fail to meet the new content standards should be revoked, the city officials recommended.”

8. PhysOrg (USA) – Living in the Past and Looking Toward the Future. “Advanced computer models are changing the field by projecting the interactions between people and the landscape. They track agricultural activity, soil erosion, game animal populations, and more. Models enable archaeologists to explore life in past societies, helping them connect field observations to a sequence of events that explains them. The results may even help predict the future. Traditional archaeology limits the types of data that can be collected, said Michael Barton, a geoarchaeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “At best we get snapshots, usually with very tiny windows on what’s going on in the past.” Barton said that, conventionally, archaeologists compile these snapshots, which represent different times and locations, into narratives in an attempt to explain the large-scale changes within groups of people and the landscapes they inhabit.”

9. Veterans Today (USA) – Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan and how it is helping some Troops and Vets with PTSD. “Back in May 2010, we ran an article Virtual Reality Combat Simulations as a Treatment for PTSD that resulted in heated debate [60 comments] about both the negative and positive aspects of the Pentagon, and Department of Veteran’s Affairs experimentation with Virtual Reality War Simulations as a treatment for PTSD. Among those contributing to that discussion in a dignified manner was Professor Skip Rizzo, Ph.D. Associate Director – Institute for Creative Technologies and Research Professor – Psychiatry and Gerontology University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. In sum readers can conclude that Skip is the Father (or Founder) of Virtual Reality (VR) as a treatment to help heal active duty troops and Vets of PTSD. For the record, Dr. Rizzo and other proponents of VR, to treat PTSD, claim only that it is a TREATMENT not a cure for PTSD, and is to be used in conjunction with other treatments and therapies.”

10. Ars Technica (USA) – A decade to separate us: Ars reviews StarCraft 2. “Gamers have expectations for StarCraft 2 that will be impossible to meet. Players have waited a decade for a sequel to what is widely considered to be one of the best real-time strategy games of all time, and one of the world’s most-played PC games, period. Blizzard certainly isn’t afraid to make bold choices: LAN gaming is out, the title is being split into three releases, and the game is launching alongside a reboot of the popular Battle.net service that stretches across all of Blizzard’s properties.”

1. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Women Beat Men in Virtual Shopping Habits. “The shopping habits of women compared to men in virtual worlds may reflect those stereotypically seen in the real world. I’m not being sexist here: Ask 100 women if they like to shop or not and I bet you’d get a lot of positive responses. At the least, I don’t think it’s crazy to say that women like to generally shop more than men. According to a new survey, the same might be true in the worlds of virtual online games.”

2. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Want eternal life? It could be possible in the Internet of Things. “Would you feel hurt if your refrigerator stopped returning your emails? Would you be annoyed to have your dinner interrupted by a pot plant demanding a drink? Are you friends with your toilet on Facebook? Do you like the idea of a virtual avatar that contains your personality and memories — the essence of you — that could communicate with your descendants?”

3. Fort Leavenworth Lamp (USA) – ‘America’s Army’ game leads to NASA’s ‘Moonbase Alpha’. “Eight years after the Army Game Studio launched its initial first-person shooter video game, “America’s Army Recon,” NASA joined in with the release of its prototype game, “Moonbase Alpha,” July 6. The new NASA game was developed with the assistance of the Army Game Studio, so “Moonbase Alpha” and “America’s Army” share some DNA. But the two games have different goals. While the “America’s Army” game has morphed into more than 38 versions, each offering true-to-life Soldier experiences from training through combat missions, “Moonbase Alpha” allows gamers to step into the role of an astronaut at a futuristic 3-D lunar settlement. The mission scenario of “Moonbase Alpha” requires virtual astronauts to restore critical systems and oxygen flow after a meteor strike cripples a solar array and oxygen-generating equipment on the moon. Resources available to players during the game include an interactive command center, a lunar rover, mobile robotic repair units and fully-stocked equipment. “Moonbase Alpha” is free, rated “E” for play by everyone, and can be played by a single player or with multiple players online.”

4. Cult of Mac (USA) – Pocket Metaverse iPad App Improves Life In Second Life [Review]. “Unfortunately, Second Life definitely ain’t what she used to be. There have been more than a few headline-grabbing scandals in recent years, user numbers have fallen off a bit and the newest official Linden Labs viewer software hasn’t exactly gotten rave reviews. However, there is still a very large and very loyal SL contingent that is eager to access their digitized world wherever and whenever they can. Those people have been begging and pleading for a reliable Second Life viewer for the iPhone since day one. Those same people really began clamoring for something more mobile when the iPad came on the scene.”

5. Dr Dobbs (USA) – 3D Gesture-Based Interaction System Unveiled. “Touch screens such as those found on the iPhone or iPad have become a standard form of technology allowing interaction with smart phones, computers, and other devices. Now scientists at Fraunhofer FIT in Germany have developed a next-generation noncontact gesture and finger recognition system. The novel system detects hand and finger positions in real-time and translates these into appropriate interaction commands. Furthermore, the system does not require special gloves or markers and is capable of supporting multiple users.”

6. The Telegraph (UK) – Council scraps £36,000 virtual town hall in Second Life. “Tameside Council, in Greater Manchester, ‘rented’ an island in the virtual world of Second Life and built a computerised town hall, hoping it would encourage users to access local authority services. But the project has been abandoned after council chiefs admitted they could not justify the cost. Now the authority has been attacked by critics for wasting taxpayers’ money at a time when the squeeze was on public finances. John Bell, leader of the council’s Conservative oppostion, said: “They want to get in the real world, not a virtual one. “It’s absolutely barmy. They must be out of their heads. How may pavements would you be able to mend for £36,000? How many roads could you maintain?”

7. BBC News (UK) – Guide creates virtual world on Second Life after stroke. “A tour guide recovering from a stroke has created a computer-generated version of the Highlands in virtual world Second Life. Tony Hamsworth began work on the project during his year-long recuperation. Second Life users design an avatar, a computer-generated representation of themselves, to live in the online world. There are believed to be as many as 16 million users from all over the world. The virtual Highlands stretches from Inverness down Loch Ness to Fort Augustus and Loch Oich.”

8. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Gold Farmers Mimic Behavior of Drug Dealers. “The networks that sell virtual items illegally in MMORPGs behave similarly to the networks that sell actual illegal goods in the real world. Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad and Brian Keegan of Northwestern University hypothesized that the illicit activities of virtual worlds would mimic those of the real world. By studying both gold farmers and drug dealers, they found that the techniques used to keep both in business were very similar. The pair says they compared data from an EverQuest 2 gold farming network with “a drug trafficking ring obtained from a Canadian law enforcement taskforce called Project Caviar.” The data released is a bit complicated, but they found that the gold farming network “exhibits a clear pattern of dissortative mixing that resembles the dissortative pattern observed in the offline Caviar drug trafficking network,” which they say is “key evidence that behaviors in online, virtual worlds also map onto behaviors found in the offline, real world.”

9. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Digits Live Show: Virtual Goods Show High Risk of Fraud. “As sales of virtual goods on sites like Facebook, Second Life, and World of Warcraft become increasingly popular, cyber thievery is also on the rise. Online consumers spent than $2 billion on virtual goods such as songs downloaded from iTunes and gifts and currency on Facebook and gaming sites in 2009, and more than 1% of these transactions involved stolen credit cards, fake goods, and other fraudulent actions. The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen and Jessica Vascellaro discuss the growing market for digital wares and the steps that social-networking and gaming sites are taking to prevent fraud in their virtual marketplaces.”

10. Boston Globe (USA) – Stuck in your online routines? Give this a shot. “Attention Second Lifers: Are you afraid, even in your fantasy worlds, of new experiences. Your avatar might be a candidate, then, for a psychotropic drug designed to treat Wanderlust Deficit Disorder — in other words, Internet addiction. The drug, Virta-Flaneurazine (virtaflaneurazine.wordpress.com) is actually a bit of downloadable code that causes Second Life avatars to rapidly and uncontrollably teleport from one Second Life location to the next and to walk and fly in circles. The idea is to get people thinking about how much time they spend stuck in the same old places, in-world and out.”

1. BBC (UK) – View from the end of the world. “Taking a journey to the end of the world might not be for everyone, but in the virtual spaces of gaming and online environments, it’s not as dangerous as it might seem. Robert Overweg in the Netherlands has been capturing virtual spaces since 2007 and his latest project has produced some of the most eerie and unexpected pictures from the worlds of first-person shooter video-games. He first found the edges of a world while playing a game called Left for Dead. “I saw normal road, walls and bushes but then the road just ended – it was foggy. So I decided to capture this and go into other games and explore their aesthetics of the ends of their worlds,” Mr Overweg said.”

2. The Guardian (UK) – Internet addiction driving South Koreans into realms of fantasy. “s dusk descends on the Sinchon neighbourhood of Seoul, a wave of Saturday shoppers melts away, on cue, into restaurants and bars. But in a windowless room several floors above the throng, Ji Yu-tae is steeling himself for a very different night’s entertainment. His only companions are a bottle of vitamin drink, cigarettes and a monitor displaying a scene from Aion, one of South Korea’s most popular online games. When the hunger pangs become irresistible, he will click a box in the corner of his PC screen and order instant noodles. By Monday morning, after two days of almost non-stop gaming, Ji will make his way to work, pale and sleep-deprived, but content that he has progressed in the virtual world that has been his second home for the past two years. Seated next to him among rows of screens at this PC bang, an internet cafe in the South Korean capital, are scores of fellow obsessives whose attachment to online gaming is fast becoming a problem in the world’s most advanced internet society.”

3. Ars Technica (USA) – Gamers crave anonymity, so Blizzard scuttles Real ID plans. “Blizzard did not make many friends with its recent decision to force users to post with their real names in its official forums. The response was immediate and deafening, with pages and pages of users complaining bitterly about the new rule. One Blizzard employee posted his own name to prove the system’s safety only to have his personal information, including address and phone number, posted on the forum. The company listened to the feedback, and is now reversing course. “We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums,” Mike Morhaime, the CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, wrote. “As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”

4. Huffington Post (USA) – Overview: Asia’s Social Media Scene. “Asia’s diverse cultures, languages and levels of economic development have always made it an exciting place to work. Now, however, Asia’s wide range of digital ecosystems have created wildly divergent virtual worlds that few people understand. These virtual worlds are, however, having a very real impact on Asias economics, politics and culture. I run Ogilvy’s team of social media specialists in Asia and created this video for an internal meeting to show some recent developments across the region. Countries in Asia with a similar level of development can have extremely different ways of approaching the Internet. In Korea, broadband connections are available virtually everywhere, while Japan’s Internet population is highly reliant on mobile.”

5. Times Higher Education (UK) – Sceptics start to see the other side of Second Life. “Hostility between academics who advocate teaching through virtual worlds and those who scorn the idea is being blamed for holding back the evolution of higher education. The warning comes despite evidence that universities are slowly embracing virtual environments such as Second Life for teaching, according to a report from the Virtual World Watch consultancy. The report, Zen and the Art of Avatar Maintenance, says that like the two characters in Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, academics hold polarised views of learning online. “Some people take to it with great enthusiasm; others recoil in dismay, horror or anger,” writes the study’s author, John Kirriemuir.”

6. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Reality Gets a Makeover. “French electronics company Parrot SA plans next month to release a toy helicopter with a twist. The AR Drone has a pair of cameras to relay video to iPhones or iPads, which function as the remote control. The device also recognizes certain objects, such as other AR Drones, and can add graphics to the video feed, creating a videogame played out in the real world. The $299 toy is the latest example of an effort to commercialize augmented reality, a technique in which extra information or graphics are added to ordinary surroundings. From virtual mirrors that superimpose a shade of lipstick on a potential buyer’s face, to restaurant reviews that pop up when a person points a camera phone at a restaurant, proponents say the technology has a range of possible uses beyond videogames that mix the real and virtual worlds.”

7. Bendigo Advertiser (Australia) – Professor nurses a real passion for regional health. “Professor Isabelle Ellis is looking forward to the challenges of her new role as professor of rural and regional nursing at the La Trobe Rural Health School. Professor Ellis was appointed by the La Trobe University board and will also head the school of nursing and midwifery. Professor Ellis was the mastermind behind a virtual online hospital course called v-Hospital, which enables nursing students studying externally to access real-life nursing in rural and remote areas. Her program was heralded a world first after it was launched at the Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory in 2007. After leaving the NT, she took up a role at the University of Western Australia, where she continued to develop her passion for helping disadvantaged communities in rural and remote areas.”

8.Marketing Vox (USA) – Cascadian Farm Becomes First Branded Crop in FarmVille. “Organic brand Cascadian Farm is becoming the first branded organic crop to be offered in Zynga’s popular online game FarmVille. Beginning July 19 through July 26, Cascadian Farm will give FarmVille players such benefits as coupon offers, organic farming and green living tips and – per the game’s philosophy – the opportunity to enhance their farm. The campaign was developed with the support of Sterling-Rice Group. The brand has recreated the real Cascadian Farm – located in the Upper Skagit Valley of Washington’s North Cascade Mountains – virtually, with the online fruits and vegetables planted in similar fashion. There’s also an avatar farmer called “Farmer Joe Cascadian,” who’ll serve as the “virtual” tender to the brand’s own FarmVille farm.”

9. Gamasutra (USA) – Virtual Fairground Launches Engine for 3D Flash-based MMO Games and Virtual Worlds. “Virtual world and MMO games specialist Virtual Fairground announced today the launch of its browser-based virtual world and MMO game development platform, The Ride. The Ride enables reliable and rapid development of advanced and scalable 3D Flash-based virtual worlds and MMO games at a fraction of the cost usually associated with these types of products and services. Virtual Fairground has spend over 2 years developing this proprietary technology and design platform after raising US 4 million in venture capital in 2008.”

10. Government Technology (USA) – Edmonton, Alberta, Replicating City in Second Life. “Second Life may be a scary, uncharted world for most local governments, but not for Edmonton, Alberta.
In the capital of Canadian province Alberta, CIO Chris Moore is on a mission to recreate his city in the virtual world, where avatars roam and interact like they would in real life. Launched in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, Second Life is an immersive online environment and a 3-D modeling tool based around simple geometric shapes that allows users to build virtual objects. At the beginning of the year, Second Life had 18 million accounts registered. Moore is one of them. When it comes to business, he likes to plug in.”