1. IT Business (Canada) – Ontario’s virtual world recruiting effort. “Second Life isn’t quite the hot topic that it used to be.
Web-based social networks seem to have taken at least some of the steam out of virtual worlds approaches to digital collaboration. It seems people prefer instantaneous, mostly text-based social communications rather than immersive 3D environments that allow you to construct your own objects, code your own physics and program your own behaviours.
But the community of Second Life is still alive and well amongst a certain niche. The virtual world is still appealing enough for many instituions to particpate there, and for the Ontario Public Service to recruit new employees. The provincial government’s Second Life site is outfitted so avatars can particpate in the daily activities of many public service jobs including fire fighter, paramedic, and water tester.”

2. University of Ulster Online (UK) – Advanced 3D Heralds New Teaching Dimension. “‘Virtual world’ technology has the potential to transform education and learning, an international conference at the University of Ulster’s Magee campus heard today. It is a young but rapidly evolving sector but already every university in the UK uses it in some element of teaching and research, according to Michael Callaghan, a Magee computer scientist and senior lecturer who is one of chief conference organisers. At “IMMERS[ED] 2010: The Second National Workshop on Teaching in Immersive Worlds” today, leading educators and industrial experts unravelled some of technology’s mysteries and championed its promise before an audience of academics, researchers, teachers and “serious games” enthusiasts.”

3. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – More Social Games Including Customizable Avatars. “Customizable avatars are one of the defining features of virtual worlds and may soon become a major feature in social gaming. Zynga is introducing heavily customizable avatars into its flagship game FarmVille while CrowdStar is attributing high earnings from its new game It Girl to customizable avatars. While many social games have featured avatars before this and even sold avatar customization virtual goods, the feature was only rarely a major emphasis of the game.”

4. New Scientist (USA) – Game characters to get authentically rumpled clothes. “Computer game developers use sophisticated algorithms to inject real physics into virtual worlds – painstakingly mimicking the way that light reflects off objects, for instance. But there’s something unrealistic about the citizens of those virtual worlds: their clothes barely register a crease or crumple, no matter how much running and jumping they perform. That could soon change, thanks to software which ensures that a game character’s clothes ripple and ruffle realistically as the action unfolds. Carsten Stoll of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and his colleagues began by generating a 3D laser scan of an actor in costume, and manually added a simple virtual skeleton. Next, the team recorded video footage of the actor moving, and uploaded it into a program that tracks the actor’s silhouette through each frame. By comparing the 3D scan with the sequence of silhouettes, the software identifies which parts of the actor’s outline deform most freely, indicating that they are covered in loose cloth.”

5. Inside Social Games (USA) – It Girl, FarmVille Show Growing Social Gaming Trend: Avatar Customization. “Avatars have been popular for nearly as long as the web itself, and customizing them has been a key part of gaming and virtual worlds, from Second Life to IMVU to other sites worldwide. Likewise, paying for avatar decorations has been an important source of virtual goods revenue for many games. But the concept has gotten relatively little attention among social game developers. Most games have been focused on mechanics like harvesting and baking, and while those typically do provide players for avatars, the offerings have been slim.”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – Interview: Roblox, The Little-Known, User-Generated LEGO Competitor. “Unlike most highly commercialized free-to-play kids’ virtual worlds, Roblox started as an outgrowth of technology designed to simulate physics. It’s a pure physics-based play space; kids arrange the blocks into LEGO-like structures, and others can access these spaces as they wish. Rather than a virtual world, it’s a collection of user-generated spaces: in terms of how the site is set up, it’s almost like a YouTube of play. When its creators put it in front of kids as part of an educational package, they quickly noticed how much fun the kids were having with it, and moved to develop it into a product with that audience in mind. Now, Roblox has launched and found an organically growing audience, finally reaching the point where its first promotional deal, with Disney, has gotten off the ground. ”

7. Marketing Vox News (USA) – Can Wunder-app FarmVille Drive Traffic to the iPad? “Zynga has released Farmville for Apple’s iPad. The free app has been customized to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen and touch interface, letting players zoom in and out to view their farms, harvest crops, or drive tractors with the tap of a finger. Push notifications alert iPad users to their crops’ status.”

8. io9 (USA) – In Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail, a real war over virtual Hells. “Iain M. Banks’ new novel, Surface Detail, is some of the best work he’s done in his galaxy-spanning Culture universe. A story of virtual Hell and true resurrection, it’s about the consequences of technology that makes religious afterlives possible. At the center of a sprawling cast of characters – including hyperintelligent AI Minds, virtual avatars, politicians, slaves, and ambiguously-sentient alien habitats – is a woman named Lededje. She’s from a vast but low-level civilization called the Sichult Enablement, which has space travel and advanced science but still embraces a form of slavery called “indented intagliation.” When one family owes another money, they must give one or more of their children to pay those debts. The “indented” children are often bred expressly for this purpose, with a beautiful tattoo signifying ownership written into the structure of every cell of their body – essentially a fractal tattoo that covers the skin, and continues on into infinite smallness inside the DNA itself. Lededje is one of the most valuable tattooed “intagliates” owned by Veppers, a powerful businessman whose family made its first fortune in massive multiplayer games.”

9. GigaOM (USA) – Oh! Oh! Even Linden Lab Founder Is Leaving. “Four months after CEO Mark Kingdon left the San Francisco-based Linden Lab — the company behind erstwhile hot virtual world Second Life — interim CEO and founder Philip Rosedale is getting real too. He is leaving the company he started in 1999 in order to pursue his new idea – LoveMachine, a collaboration software company.”

10. Military & Aerospace Electronics (USA) – Simulation and training technology pushes graphics to create the most realistic learning environment possible. “Realism is of the utmost importance to the pilot in training; realistic flight simulation immerses pilots in training scenarios and lend to greater effectiveness. Like L-3 Link with its high-definition displays and rich content, Quantum3D in San Jose, Calif., is in the business of creating realistic visual environments that immerse military pilots into any virtual training scenario. “The military uses Quantum3D’s high-performance image generators for a range of flight simulation and training initiatives that demand a highly realistic visual environment, including initial and recurring flight training, evaluating cockpit designs, testing new aircraft characteristics and handling qualities, and other engineering simulation applications,” says Pratish Shahk, director of marketing at Quantum3D. Advances in shader technologies enable Quantum3D engineers to add more realism to scenes providing pilots and trainees a more realistic virtual world. “With shader technologies, we can integrate more realistic-looking environmental elements — clouds, oceans, and other effects — creating a virtual learning environment that looks and feels real,” Shahk says.”

1. Wired (USA) – Geeky Gamers Build Working Computers out of Virtual Blocks. “Ben Craddock has been busy gathering Redstone. He collects blocks of the virtual material from deep within the game world of Minecraft, then pulverizes it into a powder and sets to work. For most Minecraft players, Redstone might wind up in a virtual torch that will light their way when the sun goes down or open doors to underground traps in the game. But Craddock, 21, who goes by the handle ‘theinternetftw,’ has something else in mind: He’s trying to engineer a single bit of memory that’s small enough to snap onto a 16-bit arithmetic logic unit, or ALU, a key component in a working computer that he’s already built out of virtual stone blocks inside the game. “We have lots of programs designed to [help us] learn to build chips,” says Craddock, an undergraduate student in computer science at the University of Georgia, whose Minecraft computer simulation video rivaled Britney Spears in popularity on YouTube last week. “All of them are very clinical. In a game, it becomes a challenge to overcome the limitations. It’s a visceral, engaging reaction.”

2. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Second Life Study Focuses on Real-World Addictions. “People seem to keep on coming up with new, bizarre, and fascinating uses for Second Life. The latest, created by a UCLA PHD candidate, was to use the digital world to study how virtual drug paraphernalia would affect the cravings of a meth addict. Chris Culbertson was inspired to create this experiment thanks to “reports of alcoholics and smokers developing cravings while visiting virtual worlds devised by addiction researchers.” So he created a virtual meth house and then invited seventeen meth addicts to navigate the construct while under observation at UCLA. Aside from filling out questionnaires while they proceeded through the house, the addicts’ heart rates were monitored to study their cravings.”

3. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Initiative: free land for educators migrating from Second Life. “The Immersive Education Initiative, a Boston-based non-profit coalition, announced today that it will offer free land, and free migration services, for educators working in Second Life’s Teen Grid. The Initiative currently provides thousands of OpenSim regions to members around the world through its Education Grid project, Aaron Walsh, founding director of the Immersive Education Initiative, told Hypergrid Business. “The Immersive Education Initiative has approximately 3,000 members worldwide and continues to grow at the rate of approximately 100 new members a month,” he said. About 75 percent of those members use virtual worlds provided by the Education grid, and the majority of those are private, secure OpenSim-based worlds, he added.”

4. WoW Insider (USA) – The Lawbringer: Real money transactions and some eBay history. “eBay and massively multiplayer online role playing games have a deep, rich and occasionally sordid past. As social beings, we’ve been bartering, trading and selling our time and goods for the entirety of human history. The internet just made things even easier. Hell, buying some gold or an item off of eBay isn’t the first time you’ve probably spent money for a work-around in a game. Ever heard of Game Genie? We paid money for that at one point in our lives. This week, The Lawbringer delves into the past, remembering the good ol’ days when the internet came in three varieties: 28.8k, 33.6k and 56k v.90. Also, 14.4k, but only losers had such weak baud. Please don’t make me go back further in time. You’re probably making modem sounds right now, pretending to go ksshhhh ksshhhh bee doo be dooo wha wha wha wha wha wha wha beeboobeeboobeebeeboobeep, so we should probably start this up. These were the days when you could browse eBay for a Silver Sword of Vanquishing for Ultima Online or buy plat in EverQuest. These were the homesteading, Wild West days. Eventually, companies either went the EverQuest route and sold stuff themselves or the Star Wars Galaxies path of banning accounts up for sale. ”

5. Marketing Week (UK) – The responsibility of brands engaging with children online. “As brands turn to online environments, social networks and virtual worlds to engage with a younger audience, the responsibility they have to keep them safe within those environments is becoming increasingly clear. Teenage brains are still developing and, according to a study by Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at the US Temple University, this lack of maturity results in an ’underdeveloped sense of responsibility,’ ’impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions’, and a greater likelihood of being subject to peer pressure and negative influence.”

6. CNET (USA) – Nukotoys aims for next-generation toy empire. “To hear Rodger Raderman and Doug Penman tell it, one of the biggest shortcomings of the modern toy industry is that it has little in common with Silicon Valley. And the two are here to remedy that situation. Raderman and Penman are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Nukotoys, a San Francisco-based company that is aiming to take the best elements of the Silicon Valley startup–rapid prototyping, interactive technology, nimbleness, financial efficiency, and scalability–and apply them to the business of making fun, engaging, and educational toys worthy of the second decade of the 21st century. For sure, that means a mixture of offline and online presences, but Nukotoys hopes to win over millions of kids–and their parents, of course–by bringing a special blend of mixed-media and online and offline interactivity to a series of games that are tied in to some of the most popular franchises and media properties in the world.”

7. KKTV.com (USA) – Farmville: Not Just Fun And Games. “Farmville, Mafia Wars, Restaurant City. All Internet games that can be played on sites like Facebook. But click on the wrong places in these virtual worlds and players could lose real money without even knowing it. Some third-party advertisers are preying on the popularity of games on social networking sites. Farmville has more than 60 million users. CNN reported in September that it may be the most widely played video game in existence. Deceptive Internet ads offer Farmville currency by just filling out an IQ quiz. To get the results, users are asked to send their cell phone number and enter a code–and the scam is complete. Then a fee, $10 a month or more, starts appearing on their cell phone bill.”

8. ZDNet (USA) – Gartner: 3DTV, 4G, cloud, activity streams at peak of hype cycle. “Gartner is out with its 2010 hype cycle and 3DTV, 4G, activity streams and cloud computing are at the peak of inflated expectations. It’s doubtful any of those items will be all that surprising. More interesting are the technologies headed toward the “trough of disillusionment,” an area where virtual worlds resides. E-book readers, telepresence and microblogging are also on the slippery slope to disillusionment, according to a statement.”

9. The Detroit News (USA) – GM’s high-tech scanner puts vehicles on virtual roads. “Buick is tackling the world’s roughest, most challenging roads — with a 3-D scanner. A team of engineers at General Motors Co. have created a high-tech scanner that can record all the bumps and grooves of a road’s surface and digitally replicate them on the computer screen. The goal is to use them in vehicle testing without having to put the cars and trucks on real world roads. Of course, a virtual road requires virtual tires and a virtual vehicle, which engineers are creating at GM, said Mine Tasci, one of about 10 members on the development team. “This helps us avoid a lot of late changes in the vehicle’s development,” Tasci said. “It definitely helps with identifying problems early on.”

10. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – MuniGov Launches GovGrid Project. “MuniGov has launched the GovGrid, an OpenSim-based virtual world designed for use by local government agencies. Land in GovGrid is priced at $25 per month per region with a $50 setup fee. A four-region “mini-grid” costs $75 per month, with a $220 setup fee. From 10 to 15 avatars can occupy any region at the same time. Full estate management tools will be available, as well as the ability to connect to other grids. MuniGov’s creation of GovGrid was prompted by an announcement that land prices for non-profit organizations in Second Life would double beginning in January. At the time, MuniGov was holding meetings in land donated by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association). Following the announcement, NOAA announced that it would have to close down the sim that MuniGov was using. This forced MuniGov to begin organizing a move to OpenSim. ”

1. Mashable (USA) – New Facebook App Monitors Your Child’s Gaming Behaviors. “arents wishing to follow along as their children play games online have a new friend in Piggyback, a recently launched Facebook application designed for such purposes. Piggyback, built by newly launched startup Media Chaperone, is a free Facebook application for parents who want to monitor in real time their children’s online social and gaming activities from their Facebook profiles.”

2. Inside Social Games (USA) – How Design Choices Impact Virtual Goods Purchases in Games. “Only two years ago, I was attending a conference on virtual worlds and people were discussing whether or not microtransactions would be a viable business model. Many people were skeptical about whether the success of microtransactions in Asia would translate to North American users. Now, there seems to be less talk about whether or not microtransactions work, and more talk about what makes them work. Industry stats show that yes, people are spending real money on social games. That said, however, the percentage of players who actually spend money is extremely small. From a research standpoint, it has been difficult to find out the characteristics of these spenders because of the difficulty in getting enough people to provide a sample size large enough to derive results that we could generalize.”

3. VentureBeat (USA) – Nexon Invests In Spanish Virtual World Developer BoomBang Games. “South Korea’s Nexon wants to be a bigger player on the global gaming stage. Today, the company announced it has made an investment in Spanish game studio BoomBang Games. Nexon acquired 32 percent of the shares of BoomBang, a Flash game developer based in Barcelona. Nexon’s goal is to reinforce its line-up of light community games and to strengthen its business in Latin America, where, of course, Spanish is a popular language. BoomBang Games was founded in 2004 by chief executive Luis Oses and Max Bevilacqua.”

4. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (USA) – Uncharted Realms. “In a virtual world such as Second Life where participants exchange virtual cash in transactions adding up to billions in the real world … where does a citizen go for virtual justice? Just one of the many questions explored in a new book by Rutgers law professor Greg Lastowka, “Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds.” The book debuts less than a month after Oliver Chiang’s report at Forbes’ SelectStart blog that sector analysts predict the exchange of virtual goods and services will pass the $2 billion mark next year … which would represent a doubling of the realm’s cash activity within two years.”

5. Birmingham Post (UK) – Daden creates 3D lab for University of Leicester. “A Birmingham firm which specialises in building virtual worlds has won a contract to create a 3D laboratory to help students learn to screen for inherited genetic disease. Birmingham Science Park-based Daden is creating the virtual lab to help students at the University of Leicester as part of a project addressing the limitations of teaching in working laboratories. These include the pressures of time and the costs of handling real equipment and working together with peers, lecturers and demonstrations.”

6. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Education Discounts in Second Life: Loss or gain? “I hate that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach when I know something has been lost that I care about. After my initial shock of hearing that Linden Labs was dropping education discounts, I immediately communicated with colleagues (most of whom I have never met in person) about “what will we do?” Hand wringing. Then during the day today, Maria Korolov, from Trombly International, asked me a simple question in an email — “Do you think the Lindens are doing the right thing here?” – and that question ignited a spark that I think will grow like a California brushfire. That is simply because it was clear to me that it didn’t matter – this was no longer about Linden Lab. Yes, I am very disappointed that I will have to front-up to the University and tell them I have invested precious capital budget in a failed project.”

7. Search Engine Watch (USA) – Losing the Plot In Second Life? A Tinfoil Hat Theory About Linden Labs. “So it seems the Powers That Be here at SearchEngineWatch (SEW) have decided to lose their collective sanity long enough to give me a permanent bit of bandwidth to write about Second Life/Virtual Worlds once a week. But any discussion starts with a perspective, and I think it’s only fair that I deliver mine, up front, so there’s no mistaking it: For the most part, my Second Life is a job. I’m phrasing it that way because there’s been a longstanding philosophical debate about what Second Life is. Usually that gets divided into binary camps of game/not game, and the debate can get very heated and ugly. My view is a little broader- it is whatever it is for you. Ultimately, I think it’s a blank canvas.”

8. Blast Magazine (USA) – Panasonic announces new handheld. “Do you long for your virtual worlds when at work? Do you wish you were riding your trusty mount when you’re really slumming it on the city bus? Panasonic has something they’d like to show you. The long rumored, and finally unveiled Jungle has finally been unveiled by Panasonic and grants access to MMOs and other online titles to gamers on the go. Featuring a few QWERTY keyboard, shoulder buttons, a touch screen display, HDMI port and a D-pad, The Jungle looks to take on handheld kings like the iPhone and the Nintendo’s DS…oh, and the PSP too…I guess.”

9. VentureBeat (USA) – Nukotoys aims to be Silicon Valley’s toy company. “Toys and electronics are still in search of a happy marriage. Nukotoys believes it has the answer with toys and games that merge virtual and real world activities. The startup is coming out of stealth mode today in the hopes of becoming Silicon Valley’s toy company. The San Francisco company is announcing a number of interconnected toys that combine online virtual world games and collectible cards that can be scanned by computers. The company will also build toy-game products based on two major brands: the Ology books for children (such as Dragonology) and Animal Planet. And in December, PBS Kids will launch an online game built by Nukotoys; the 3D educational adventure game will teach kids reading.”

10. Gamasutra (USA) – Feature: The Death Of Linearity? “Tale of Tales’ Michael Samyn (The Path) describes how narrative linearity got tangled up in the game medium, and suggests how leaving it behind will allow a true art form to emerge. Calling “the joys of linearity… beyond dispute”, Samyn says that it’s no surprise linear storytelling became a function of games early in the medium. “We love the tension that comes with a carefully constructed story arc. From Greek theater through medieval fairy tales and printed novels to stereoscopic high definition cinema, humankind has enjoyed storytelling for thousands of years,” he observes. “As we perfected the presentation of our creations, the backbone of our designs shifted from the linearity of competitive gameplay to the linearity of the narrative arc. Our characters and worlds simply demanded this,” writes Samyn.”