1. Singularity Hub (USA) – Your Car is the Arcade: Driving Simulator Uses Real Vehicle in Virtual Worlds.”Daredevils have an insatiable need for speed, but they play with fire when pushing their vehicle or driving abilities too far. Tag Systems offers a unique solution by transporting the motorist and their physical car to a virtual road, a first in driving simulation technology. Sensors collect real-time performance data on an actual automobile, giving you a first-person perspective in 3D world. Basically, you can accelerate, steer, and brake inside your own car as you would on the open road, but the vehicle is driving in place on steel rollers. This one-of-a-kind VR system allows drivers to approach 150 mph on renowned Formula 1 courses, compete in Fast and Furious-style drag races, or even cruise the surface of the moon.”

2. VentureBeat (USA) – DEMO: Next Island opens time travel for its virtual world. “Virtual worlds haven’t fared well as users migrate to social networks. But that hasn’t stopped David Post from launching Next Island. Today at DEMO, the company is formally launching an awareness campaign for its virtual world and enabling the key feature of the world that could be most appealing for users: time travel. Next Island has been in the works for nearly three years. The virtual world opened for its first beta test in December. The world has since grown to nearly 2,000 users and the company is drawing attention to the high quality of its 3D graphics and the sheer creativity of its sci-fi adventure themed world.”

3. The Hollywood Reporter (USA) – Nickelodeon Enters MMO Games Space with ‘Monkey Quest’. “Nickelodeon used GDC 2011 as the coming out party for its first entry into the massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming space. The company unveiled Monkey Quest, a new family-friendly, free-to-play MMO game based on an original property, at a party held at AT&T Park. The game, which encourages players to work together to solve puzzles and partake in challenges, was also available throughout the week at the Unity booth at Moscone Center. Monkey Quest will go live in April. Nickelodeon has a rich lineup of popular gaming sites, IPs, and virtual worlds. Addicting Games and Shockwave are two of the top gaming destinations online. Addicting Games offers more than 4,369 games and provided over 102 million game plays in December 2010. Shockwave serves more than 1,800 games and provided over 47 million game plays in December 2010.”

4. Mashable (USA) – Inside One Man’s Kickstarter Quest to Build True Artificial Life. “Virtual worlds have long been populated by creatures that interact, reproduce, compete, evolve and die. But by and large, they do so because their behavior is programmed by developers. These efforts can produce complex virtual ecosystems, but they’re not quite the digital reflections of what happens in nature. Life in the real world is “programmed” by DNA, but its form and behavior are determined by the random mutation of genetic code, not by the intentions of a developer. Computer scientists have always been intrigued by the prospect of creating “artificial life” — that is, digital genetic code that can sustain itself over generations and adapt to meet the demands of a virtual environment without human interference.”

5. PC World (USA) – The History of Stereoscopic 3D Gaming. “In 1968, Ivan Sutherland of Harvard University created the first stereoscopic computer display (nicknamed the “Sword of Damocles” for the unwieldy size of the apparatus that hung over the user’s head). Sutherland’s experiments with virtual worlds began in 1966 at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, and they culminated in the invention of the first 3D head-mounted display and the first virtual computer environment, a wire-frame simulation of a room (shown here).”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – Bigpoint U.S. Developing Universal Monsters MMO. “Bigpoint Inc., the U.S. based subsidiary of German browser-based games publisher Bigpoint, announced that it is working with Universal Pictures on an MMO based on Universal Monsters. Unlike SEE Virtual Worlds’ upcoming online world also using the Universal Monsters license, this project will be a third-person, multiplayer action RPG in which players fight against famous film monsters from Universal’s catalog like Dracula and The Wolf Man. Bigpoint’s San Francisco studio, which has been working on the project since early February, says it “aspires to capture the integrity of each property and include some of the early film techniques used in bringing the original monster characters to the silver screen.”

7. Detroit Free Press (USA) – Virtual caribou help scientists unearth Lake Huron’s secrets. “On a computer, Bob Reynolds watches caribou run across a wilderness of spruce and lagoons on the edge of Lake Huron. A few of the creatures pause to graze, while the rest move slowly across the tundra. What’s unusual is that the caribou herd is simulated. They are moving at their own whim across a virtual world that mimics an ancient land bridge that existed 10,000 years ago, but now is submerged beneath the waters of Lake Huron.”

8. Silicon India (India) – Indian Gaming Startups Are They Really in the Game? “he Ferrari whooshed across the Lamborghini and there comes the hit point – it’s the Jackpot – Oh yes, it’s the undying NFS, the car racing game. For some the virtual adventure is the perfect idea of gaining nirvana, and even a 10 year old’s combat skills can reign supreme in the game world. Today, gamers constitute 41.2 percent of the total Active Internet users in India, a whopping 89 percent increase from the 2007, as per a report by IAMAI. The growth has been lucrative enough to build up the confidence of the newbies, who have just entered the quasi-penetrated market. Younger people are growing up with the Internet and online games. As they enter the workforce and continue to have greater purchasing power, the market for gaming in India will expand dramatically. “Virtual gaming is definitely big now after 2010. It is about $1 billion market in U.S. and about $8 billion worldwide. It’s huge in Asia Pacific mainly in China, Japan, S. Korea, while India is yet to gain the same speed,” says Sumit Gupta, CEO of BitRhymes.”

9. Wired (USA) – Clive Thompson on How Games Make Work Seem Like Play. “In summer 2009, the UK’s Guardian newspaper had a problem: an enormous pile of receipts. British politicians had been caught filing what would total millions of pounds’ worth of bogus personal expenses. To try to quell the uproar, the government scanned hundreds of thousands of receipts from members of Parliament and dumped the files online—giving reporters the Herculean task of analyzing them. The editors at the Guardian fought back. They turned the task into a game—and invited the public to play. A Guardian programmer named Simon Willison created a clever web app that would present you with a randomly chosen receipt. If it looked dodgy, you could write a quick description of what you’d found, then hit a big Investigate This! button to send the receipt to the paper’s reporters. A leaderboard tracked which contributors had made the most finds. The goal: to get people competing to be top dog, just like on Xbox Live.”

10. Examiner (USA) – Lag strikes Mardi Gras in Second Life. “Going to Mardi Gras in a virtual world instead of New Orleans has some real advantages. No airfare, no hotel bills, no travel time. While it can’t equal being in New Orleans in person, it’s more realistic for most of us. Until lag strikes. If you’ve been in a virtual world any length of time, you know what lag is. It’s like you went to New Orleans and suddenly, instead of a hurricane, the laws of physics went haywire. Gravity increased. Air became thick as molasses, making walking impossible. The speed of light plummeted to barely a crawl. There are huge blotches of the scene around you, walls, floats, costumes, that you simply can’t see. That’s what lag is like, and it struck Mardi Gras in Second Life hard today.”

1. LiveScience (USA) – Virtual Behavior Labs Discover What Gamers Want. “Imagine the power to know every consumer purchase ever made, big or small, or the gory details of any crime ever committed. That’s the new reality in the worlds of video games. Tens of millions of gamers inhabit virtual worlds where behaviors or actions can be tracked and tallied, creating some astounding statistics. In the first two weeks of release for the cowboy-themed “Red Dead Redemption,” for instance, 13,250,237 virtual U.S. soldiers were killed (or about the same number of actual German and Soviet military deaths combined during World War II). Players also committed a total of 131,904,068 counts of in-game murder and hunted down millions of virtual critters, including 55,813,649 wolves. The rabbit hole goes deeper. Developers of the futuristic sci-fi game Mass Effect 2 found that 80 percent of the game’s players used the face customization system to change their appearances, rather than use the default hero or heroine. Some games even track giggleworthy player behaviors; Mafia II records how long players spend staring at in-game Playboy centerfolds.”

2. TechCrunch (USA) – Moshi Monsters Aims To Become The Facebook for Kids (TCTV). “Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith came to my office today to tell me about Moshi Monsters, his company’s virtual world for kids that is signing up a new member every second. Moshi Monsters was his “last roll of the dice” to save his virtual worlds startup in 2008, and it worked. Moshi Monsters is up to 35 million registered users, with about 7 million of those active every month, says Smith. And it is projected to generate $100 million this year from a combination of subscriptions and gross retail merchandise sales. The site is geared towards kids between 5 to 12 years old. Each kid gets a monster pet and a room that can be decked out with virtual goods. But instead of trying to create “just another bloody virtual world,” Smith wanted it to be more like a safe social network. “Instead of copying Club Penguin,” he says, “we focused more on Facebook and tried to re-imagine that for kids.”

3. Gamasutra (USA) – Image Metrics Acquires Big Stage. “Facial animation tech company Image Metrics has acquired Big Stage, creator of the avatar creation platform Portable You. Big Stage’s tech lets users translate photos of themselves into 3D animated characters for use in virtual worlds, video clips and online communities. Image Metrics says it’ll merge that avatar creation platform into its existing animation tech to create a new product suite to launch in the second half of this year. The company says the merger will help its licensees integrate more realistic avatars into consumer-facing projects.”

4. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Even Better Than the Real Thing. “‘It’s the real world—only better.” This is how Jay Wright, business-development director at technology company Qualcomm Inc., describes the latest buzz technology to grip the digital world. So-called “augmented reality” is the overlaying of digital information onto the real world, and everyone from games designers to retailers to health-care companies to estate agents are gearing up to use it. While the potential for such technology to change the world is vast, the biggest challenge for its backers will be to convert this virtual revolution into rock-solid profits. Fortunately, there are countless ways this can be achieved, but not all are immediately obvious.”

5. ars technica (USA) – Lord British on what games can learn from Ultima Online. “My job allows me to meet many interesting people, and meeting my childhood heroes is definitely a huge bonus. When I found myself speaking with Richard Garriott for 45 minutes, I felt the need to pinch myself. This is the man who created Ultima, crafted one of the earliest virtual worlds in Ultima Online, and then used the money to go to freakin’ space. We’ll have more from the fascinating discussion a little later, but I wanted to share his answer to my most pressing question: is he playing the games he dreamed of while working on the Ultima series?”

6. FierceVOIP (USA) – Vivox sees massive user growth for gaming VoIP. “Today, Vivox, a social networking and gaming VoIP prvider, announced its worldwide user base has surpassed 45 million. In 2010, Vivox saw its user base rise from 18.5 million users to over 45 million users. Companies including Wargaming.net, IMVU, Runewaker Entertainment and Bigpoint.com use Vivox service for high-quality, reliable voice chat services within their games. Vivox enables users of social sites, online games and virtual worlds to communicate in HD quality voice and within Three Dimensional environments. It also allows unique audio advertising and virtual goods capabilities for social and gaming sites.”

7. GigaOM (USA) – Working Together: How My Virtual Team Collaborates. “In an effort to better understand the dynamics of distributed teams, I decided to interview my own virtual team members at the social media marketing agency I co-own, Conversify. I wanted to move beyond my own personal preferences and opinions, both as a virtual worker for the last eight years and as a co-founder of a virtual company.”

8. Huffington Post (USA) – Video Games: An Hour A Day Is Key To Success In Life. “The single biggest misconception about games is that they’re an escapist waste of time. But more than a decade’s worth of scientific research shows that gaming is actually one of the most productive ways we can spend time. No, playing games doesn’t help the GDP – our traditional measure of productivity. But games help us produce something more important than economic bottom line: powerful emotions and social relationships that can change our lives–and potentially help us change the world. Currently there are more than half a billion people worldwide playing online games at least an hour a day — and 183 million in the US alone. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be a gamer — 97% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report playing videogames regularly. And the average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21. That’s almost exactly as much time as they spend in a classroom during all of middle school and high school if they have perfect attendance. Most astonishingly, 5 million gamers in the U.S are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games — the same as a full time job! ”

9. Develop (UK) – “Hardcore social games can be lucrative”. “Social networks were developed and popularised by young people, and they are still their heaviest users. But, ironically, the booming social network games market is dominated by middle-aged housewives because younger people don’t play there as much there as they do elsewhere. Why has this come about and is there an opportunity for core games targeting traditional gaming’s heartland audience on social networks? The demographic mismatch of Facebook gamers to Facebook users overall has long been one of the great incongruities of the Facebook games market.”

10. Massively (USA) – New RIFT trailer shows off dynamic invasions. “Ho hum, another day, another RIFT reveal. Trion is carpet-bombing the MMORPG battlefield with an all out marketing assault as the March 1st launch date for its fantasy opus draws near. Today brings us a new trailer titled Cry Havoc, and in it we are witnesses to an interesting time-lapse presentation that shows off various in-game battles featuring large contingents of players on screen.”

1. Internet Evolution (USA) – New Virtual Worlds Still Growing. “It may be tempting to assume that growth in virtual worlds has ground to a halt. After all, There.com has shut down, and Second Life is losing land area and has stopped publishing most usage statistics. Attention has shifted to social networking platforms and mobile devices. But the action hasn’t died off. Instead, it has shifted to proprietary, enterprise-class platforms like Teleplace, ProtoSphere, and VenueGen — and to the open-source platform, OpenSim. Based on reports from educational institutions, non-profit groups, and hosting and consulting firms, I estimate that OpenSim currently has between 500,000 and 1 million users. These users are scattered across hundreds, or thousands, of private virtual worlds running on the OpenSim platform.”

2. New Scientist (USA) – CGI tricks: Slicing virtual dessert is a piece of cake. “As virtual worlds become increasingly interactive, animators have to make sure that objects within them don’t just look good on the surface, but also remain realistic when they are manipulated. This is harder to achieve with some objects than with others. Cut through a virtual sponge, for example, and the texture remains the same all the way through. But take a slice through a kiwi fruit, and the cross section will look different depending on where you cut it, and along which axis. Previous methods of modelling 3D shapes worked for objects with a uniform texture. But according to Kenshi Takayama from the University of Tokyo, it couldn’t handle objects with more complicated texture orientations such as kiwi fruit and tree stumps.”

3. Austin News KXAN (USA) – Virtual world helps in murder case. “Justice moved swiftly in the case of a man who shot his estranged wife in the head in plain sight in an Austin park last October, and now Hernan Mendieta, 35, is sentenced to 60 years in prison, just three months later. It was a virtual world created by a witness that showed Austin police what he saw after he jogged in Brushy Creek Park. Thomas Jung works creating virtual worlds for computer games. He was able to reproduce for police via animation what he saw on the morning of Oct. 26, 2010 . His witness information helped in the murder case.”

4. Mobile Entertainment (UK) – Virtual world Meez goes mobile with Android, iPhone and iPad apps. “Teen-focused virtual world Meez is launching MeezNation, a spin-off making its debut on Android and iOS devices. With more than 15 million users, Meez is one of the popular virtual worlds aimed at teenagers. Now it’s going mobile, with plans to launch a new cross-platform spin-off called MeezNation. It will launch next week with an Android app, with iPhone and iPad versions to follow in March, before ultimately extending onto the Google TV and Xbox Live platforms too.”

5. Fast Company (USA) – Egypt: Social Media as a Life or Death Proposition. “Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, many wearing bandages from from days of street fighting, turned out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday for what they are calling the ‘Day of Departure’, a nationwide cry for the immediate removal and prosecution of Hosni Mubarak who has ruled the country for 30 years. This story is now larger than Egypt and the Arab world, as international news coverage and social media has broadcast the escalating violence around the world, time and again featuring Egyptian citizens dying and risking death in order to have their message heard and for regime change to become a reality. Egypt is widely considered the litmus test for what will happen in the rest of the Arab world, but the importance of social media in its political transformation is larger than that. The use of social media in Egypt is a dramatic demonstration of a clash of cultures — of the old and new, of violence and peace, of the past and future.”

6. New Media Age (UK) – Branded virtual worlds. “With a tin man, talking lion, living scarecrow and winged monkeys, the parallel universe of Oz, invented by author L Frank Baum and made famous by the 1939 Judy Garland film, has been catapulted into the 21st Century. Tapping into a trend for transmedia storytelling, Summertime Entertainment aims to reinvigorate the Oz franchise with not only a new animated film, Dorothy of Oz, but an immersive virtual world game, Adventure in Oz. The project, launched on the Dubit platform, is riding a wave of businesses seeking brand engagement and ROI. Virtual worlds analysis company KZero reports there are now over a billion users of virtual worlds globally, 97% of them under 25. According to Matthew Warneford, chief technical officer at Dubit, virtual worlds are convening with trends in both gaming and socialising online.”

7. Confectionary News (France) – US chocolatier develops virtual factory world. “US confectioner Tcho is developing a virtual factory world which will allow customers and employees to interact online with the company’s chocolate processing facility. The iPhone application developed by Tcho and FXPal that controls the factory’s machines. Real-time sensor data and video is imported from hundreds of sensors on the 30,000-square-foot factory in San Fransisco to create the computer-based environment. “Different users can see different aspects of the data; for instance, we are designing ways for customers to track their own product from point of origin to finished product,” Larry Del Santo, marketing manager for Tcho told ConfectioneryNews.com. “In the future, visitors will be able to choose avatars and interact with each other as well as the factory itself,” said Del Santo. He said the technology will allow the company to create multi-user collaborative spaces for tasks like factory observation, virtual inspections, customer visits, employee training, process monitoring, and inventory tracking. The software is being developed by FXPal, Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto, California. Here researchers explore how new technologies like mobile augmented reality, virtual worlds, and social media can be applied in manufacturing.”

8. WVEC (USA) – Congressmen: Modeling and simulation saves money, helps train forces. “When it comes to preparing for combat, nothing can replace hands-on training. Modeling and simulation can get close. Homeland security and military defense are some of the applied research areas at the ODU Virginia Modeling and Simulation Center in Suffolk. The 50 faculty members and research scientists can create virtual worlds for training – like landing an airplane at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. “Modeling and simulation has been shown to be able to save money, use resources more efficiently and you can do things and other activities rather than real life, you save substantial sums of money,” notes Rep. Bobby Scott (D-3rd D).”

9. VentureBeat (USA) – Virtual world Habbo hits more than 200M registered users. “If you’re a teen, chances are you’ve checked into the Habbo Hotel. Sulake, the parent company of the cartoon-style virtual world, said today that more than 200 million people have registered as users for Habbo. That means they’ve created a virtual character called a Habbo. The virtual community is more than 10 years old. It started in Finland and has now grown to more than 150 countries. While traffic to virtual worlds has waned in the age of Facebook and the iPhone, Habbo’s numbers show it has fared well and is growing quickly. It shows that once a community hits critical mass, its growth can accelerate.”

10. Nextgov (USA) – Army taps Second Life for troop and family support. “The Army is bringing a program to improve troops’ physical and emotional well-being into the Second Life virtual world. The service is strengthening its Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, established in 2008, with a “virtual resiliency” campus on an Army island in Second Life, said Maj. Gen. Reuben Jones, commander of the Family, Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command. The campus will offer soldiers and their families exercise tips as well as online, avatar-led classes to improve their physical fitness. The emotional, social, family and spiritual sections will help troops develop coping mechanisms and deal with post-deployment readjustment, Jones said. Should soldiers need more help, the campus will be backed by a network of volunteers recruited through the Army chaplain’s office, said Shaunya Murrill, chief of the outreach and strategic integration division in the command’s family programs directorate.”