1. Department of Defense (USA) – Government Invites Public to Solve Challenges. “The federal government has a lot of problems to solve, and a new website it launched this week will give average citizens a forum to discuss and potentially solve those problems while vying for rewards for the best solutions. Bev Godwin, director of the U.S. General Services Administration’s Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement; Brandon Kessler, founder and CEO of ChallengePost; and Tami Griffith, science and technology manager for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Simulation and Training Technology Center, discussed the new site — Challenge.gov — during a “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable yesterday. Godwin oversees the site for the government. Kessler’s company designs and builds “challenge” sites for different clients. Challenge.gov is an extension of President Barack Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation, which opens government solutions to the general public.”

2. The Independent (UK) – Comment: The Virtual World Conference is the shape of things to come. “On 15 September, the Open University, in collaboration with the Serious Games Institute, will host a 24-hour conference. Opening in Hong Kong, the focus will shift to Europe as the eastern evening meets the UK morning, handing over at our sundown for a final eight hours on the US western coast. Despite crossing many time zones during the day, conference chairs and delegates will meet at a single location, and never have to leave the comfort of their own armchairs.”

3. Christian Science Monitor (USA) – A virtual world that breaks real barriers. “Thus far in the relatively short existence of online worlds and virtual communities, less than flattering stories typically float to the surface. The Internet is rife with tales of bad behavior: antisocial “trolls” posting inflammatory messages; players addicted to fantasy role-playing games; and marriages ruined by spouses staying up half the night to flirt in virtual spaces, even proposing marriage to people they’ve never met in the flesh. Given the power of negative thinking, it’s worth repeating: Not all that happens within the digital realms of monsters, quests, and virtual dollars is evil. Much of the zombie-shooting amounts to people having fun or finding an escape. But some online communities embrace a more lofty mission. They’re forging new relationships across the chasms of nationality, religion, and language – long the unrealized dream of some who hoped the Internet could bring us closer.”

4. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Go with the flow. “I am a sucker for physics simulations, especially in games. The last half a decade or so has brought us advances such as Havok, PhysX, and Euphoria, all of them technologies that help to make our virtual worlds a little more believable. The only thing I love more than physics in general is liquid simulation, and right now is a good time to be a fan of virtual fluid dynamics. Three games are on the horizon that play with realistic liquid simulation in very different ways. Probably the first we will get the chance to play will be Hydrophobia, a 3D survival adventure that takes place aboard a slowly sinking ocean liner. The game’s developer, Dark Energy, has spent three years just programming an engine that can model realistic water movement.”

5. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Sulake Reports Best Half-Year Results To Date. “Virtual worlds publisher Sulake announced its best half-year performance in the company’s history, earning approximately $37.9 million in revenue. This is a 20% increase year-over-year. Sulake credits the jump in revenue to reducing costs, improving operations, and a continued focus on development of its Habbo Hotel virtual world. Sulake expects its revenue growth to continue in the future.”

6. NewScientist (USA) – Avatars learn gestures to match your tone of voice. “Avatars in virtual worlds provide a richer way than email or chat to communicate online, but despite better graphics and sound quality, they still can’t rival in-person meetings. Now new software may help virtual characters appear more lifelike by imbuing them with realistic body language. Rather than assign physical gestures based on the literal meaning of a person’s spoken words, the program focuses on prosody, the combination of vocal rhythm, intonation and stress. To assemble a library of gestures associated with prosody features, Sergey Levine and Vladlen Koltun at Stanford University, California, used a motion-capture studio to digitise the movements that an actor made as he spoke.”

7. Computerworld (USA) – Second Life should be more iPhone-like, says CEO Philip Rosedale. “One of Second Life’s biggest problems, says CEO Philip Rosedale, is that it’s not enough like an iPhone. From the moment you open the box on an iPhone, it’s fun to use, and in playing, you learn how to use it. The whole process is pleasurable. Second Life is nothing like that, learning to use it is a long process, and painful for many people. I talked with Rosedale three weeks ago, when he’d been back as CEO of Linden Lab for two months. Rosedale is founder and chairman of Linden Lab, the company that created and operates Second Life. He stepped down as CEO two years ago, and returns to find the company battered and troubled.”

8. The Toronto Star (Canada) – Techno-porn: how the sex industry drives mainstream technology. “Patchen Barss might well have called his first book Hard Drive. After all, the central thesis of The Erotic Engine is that pornography has almost always powered human communication, all the way from dirty cave paintings to Google. The cover shows a couple of computer mice in a compromising position, an illustration reflective of the wit the 40-year-old Toronto author has brought to his research. Today, the international pornography industry is estimated to be a $25-billion business, and, technologically, it’s driving all sorts of things that nobody would ever connect with one-handed typing.”

9. VentureBeat (USA) – LOLapps thrives as under-the-radar Facebook social game maker. “You probably haven’t heard of LOLapps, the maker of social games on Facebook. But the company has quietly become one of the leaders of the pack among hot social game companies that are still independent. The San Francisco company has more than 100 million users. But almost nobody has kept track of that. On AppData, which measures Facebook traffic, LOLapps is listed as having about 10 million monthly active users, which doesn’t even put it the top-10 developer list. But if you consider the 100 million number, only Zynga and CrowdStar are in the same ballpark. The undercounting happens for a simple reason. The company’s two top apps, Gift Creator and Quiz Creator, have many more users than are shown in the official stats. That’s because users create their own quizzes and gifts with those apps, and are then counted as the developers of apps; LOLapps doesn’t get credited or recognized when its users create apps that spread virally on Facebook. In that sense, LOLapps is a lot like CrowdStar, another leading Facebook social game company whose quiz games don’t get counted much.”

10. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Sex world recruits Emerald team. “The adult-themed Utherverse virtual world platform is in discussions with former developers of the controversial Emerald Viewer for Second Life, the company announced. Prior to recent scandals involving an alleged distributed denial of service attack, privacy violations, and a Second Life ban this Wednesday, the Emerald viewer was primarily known for a nicer user interface than Second Life’s own official viewers — and for its “breast physics.” But bouncing boobies wasn’t the only factor that caught Utherverse’s attention.”

1. Rochester Post-Bulletin (USA) – Mayo Clinic expands in the virtual world. “Mayo Clinic has opened a new, virtual bookstore in the imaginary world called Second Life, one of many online realms that increasingly are taking on real-life importance. Mayo first opened a Second Life Gonda Building in December 2009. But now you can walk into the Mayo bookstore by signing onto secondlife.com and naming an avatar — an online caricature of yourself. It’s sort of like an avatar from the popular movie of the same name. With an avatar, you become part of the the virtual world. “Virtual Worlds hold great opportunities to grow Mayo Clinic offerings and reach out and interact with patients and non-patients in new ways, regardless of geography and in real time,” says a poster placed on an easel outside the Second Life Gonda Building.”

2. Gamasutra (USA) – US Buyer Completes Purchase Of Realtime Worlds’ MyWorld. “An anonymous US buyer has completed the purchase of Project MyWorld, the 3D virtual world platform in development by recently collapsed studio, Realtime Worlds, according to a report by Develop. However, it is still not understood whether the buyer has purchased just the MyWorld IP and game build, or will be taking on the remaining staff on the project in order to form a new spin-off studio. The news comes a fortnight after it was announced that Realtime had hired back 23 developers who had previously been laid off days before the company went into administration.”

3. Memeburn (USA) – Immersive journalism uses virtual gaming platforms to tell stories. “Ernest Wilson, the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: “What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right into the section and visit a garden?” This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we at the Annenberg school are calling “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilises gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories.”

4. io9 (USA) – Scenes from a 3-D, augmented reality metropolis. “Keiichi Matsuda creates incredible short films that depict an augmented reality city where synthetic information clouds are grafted onto brick’n’mortar material spaces. Here are two of his futureshock videos. Matsuda created this first 3D video, “Augmented (hyper)Reality: Augmented City,” for his final year at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.”

5. Canada.com (Canada) – Children wield outsized economic clout. “At age nine, the sandy-haired boy from Markham, Ont., is already a savvy shopper of electronics. When his mother told him the Nintendo DSi game he wanted was too expensive, he pursued a new strategy. He told family and friends to forgo birthday and Christmas presents and buy him gift cards to put toward the new device. Now he saves for the accompanying games – most recently Super Mario Galaxy 2. Next on his wish list: the iPod Touch. “My aunt has one and lets me play with it when she visits,” he says. Jackie Macdonald-Bartkiw, Andrew’s mom, figures that by Christmastime, he will be lobbying for more gift cards to buy his own touch technology. “I’m amazed at his patience . . . and persistence.”

6. Reuters (Canada) – Gameworld: Tween players impacting online game development. “A booming market of tweens is changing the landscape of online games.
This audience of boys and girls aged 8 to 11 has game publishers launching new games like Disney Online’s “World of Cars Online” and Sony Online Entertainment’s “Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures.” As these tweens grow older, they are also fueling the success of established online games like Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft” and Zynga’s “Farmville.” In 2007, when children’s marketing research firm KidSay asked boys what virtual worlds or online games they had visited in the past two weeks, 35 percent of boys aged 8 to 11 replied “none.”

7. Philadelphia Inquirer (USA) – Online support for significant others of military personnel overseas. “he first thing Tatiana Simpson did after her boyfriend proposed to her in a phone call from Iraq was to log on to Facebook. “Right after it happened, I posted. I had to tell them,” Simpson, 17, of Sewell, said of her social-networking friends. Simpson says the Facebook page Army Girlfriends: For All the Girls Waiting Back Home is her favorite among the forums she uses to connect with others who are dating members of the military. Simpson, who doesn’t know anyone locally who is dating a service member, relies on the site for advice. “The girls on Facebook are so easy to talk to, because you’re going through the same thing they’re going through,” she said. Like others, she has found support on Facebook from those who share her situation – the strain of having a boyfriend in the military, and often in a war zone. First-time deployments can unleash emotions and questions that are addressed in more than 1,000 Facebook forums. The military provides support groups, which helps, but most are limited to spouses and families of service members.”

8. CNN (USA) – Who says video games aren’t art? “According to Merriam-Webster, the word “art” can be defined as “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination, especially in the production of aesthetic objects.” The Oxford Dictionary says art is “the expression or application of creative skill and imagination, typically in visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” So why do so many critics — most notably Roger Ebert earlier this year — still assert that video games, the best of which rank among today’s most visually arresting and touching experiences, don’t fit these definitions? (To be fair, Ebert later amended his comments, saying, “I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.”

9. The Next Web (Dubai) – Beladcom to build a Virtual Planet in Entropia Universe for Arabs. “Jordanian game development firm Beladcom signed a deal with Swedish software company MindArk to create an online virtual world with content specifically tailored toward Arab audiences. Beladcom will be building a virtual planet within MindArk’s Entropia Universe, which is a highly advanced 3D online virtual universe, to create a virtual gaming environment with high quality entertainment, social networking, and work simulation and learning tools.”

10. VentureBeat (USA) – LOLapps thrives as under-the-radar Facebook social game maker. “You probably haven’t heard of LOLapps, the maker of social games on Facebook. But the company has quietly become one of the leaders of the pack among hot social game companies that are still independent. The San Francisco company has more than 100 million users. But almost nobody has kept track of that. On AppData, which measures Facebook traffic, LOLapps is listed as having about 10 million monthly active users, which doesn’t even put it the top-10 developer list. But if you consider the 100 million number, only Zynga and CrowdStar are in the same ballpark. The undercounting happens for a simple reason. The company’s two top apps, Gift Creator and Quiz Creator, have many more users than are shown in the official stats. That’s because users create their own quizzes and gifts with those apps, and are then counted as the developers of apps; LOLapps doesn’t get credited or recognized when its users create apps that spread virally on Facebook. In that sense, LOLapps is a lot like CrowdStar, another leading Facebook social game company whose quiz games don’t get counted much.”

1. VentureBeat (USA) – Intel and Nokia launch joint research on mobile 3D virtual worlds. “Smartphones have barely entered the 3D age, but Nokia and Intel are already racing ahead to do research on enabling 3D virtual worlds on mobile computing platforms. The two companies are announcing today a research center (pictured below) at the University of Oulu in Oulu, Finland, that will work on the technology required to make the mobile 3D virtual world possible.”

2. CNET (USA) – Virtual farm games absorb real money, real lives. “Last century’s cash crops included tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane. Now we have magic cauliflower and super berries, too–and even though they can’t be sold at market, some people still toil from dawn to dusk cultivating them. People spend not just real time but also real money growing these crops in virtual farming games that combine the allure of both games and social networking in what is usually a cute and deceptively simple package. They can be addictive: many users come back at least once a day to micromanage their farms and deal with other users’ requests. On average, the users of these types of games are spending anywhere from a few minutes a game to the greater part of an hour. Indeed, one individual who CNET spoke with said that it’s all she does between waking up and going to bed–and that’s every every day of the week.”

3. Huffington Post (USA) – Getting Physical in a Virtual World. “We’ve been talking about the ability to bring physical objects into the virtual (internet) world for quite a while now. Discussions have ranged from simply tagging physical objects and allowing humans to then attach metadata (something similar to what StickyBits does), to allowing objects the ability to be automatically tracked and to subconsciously attach and transmit metadata based on usage, location etc. There has been some speculation around Facebook’s dive (possibly called ‘Presence’) into this largely untamed world especially with reports of tests done during its F8 conference. As a marketer and a part-time anthropologist, I want to bring a cultural perspective into understanding what it might take for this marriage between the physical and virtual worlds to become a reality in our everyday lives.”

4. MediaPost (USA) – Virtual Goods Worth More than Real News: Curmudgeon. “I usually try to avoid making any statement involving the words “society,” “values,” or “priorities” — nouns which are all so vague as to be almost meaningless. I also usually don’t see any point in judging what other people do with their time or money, as long as they accord me the same indifference. But a recent realization has prompted me to (oh no, here it comes) question society’s values and priorities. Basically, it dawned on me that Americans will soon be spending more money on imaginary objects than the news. In fact, they already do. According to various estimates and forecasts, Americans spent $500 million on virtual goods in 2008, rising to $1 billion in 2009 and $1.6 billion this year. Fueled by the rise of social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars (and virtual worlds like Second Life, where sales continue to grow) U.S. spending on virtual goods may jump to $5 billion by 2014.”

5. American Medical News (USA) – Med students open to learning via new media. “Having been raised in an age of ubiquitous technology, medical students are game to using new media and virtual reality as part of their education, according to a new survey. However, students’ varied opinions about what games they would like to use, and the unresolved question of whether they would be effective, are barriers to overcome before medical schools add video games to the curriculum. Ninety percent of the 217 participants in the study — medical students at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the University of Michigan Medical School — said they would be inclined to use new media technologies if they helped to develop skills in patient interactions. Meanwhile, 98% said they think education should make better use of new media, according to the study, published online June 24 in BioMed Central.”

6. San Francisco Business Times (USA) – Fate Fickle In Second Life Too. “arely three years ago, the virtual world Second Life was all the rage, with exploding traffic numbers, eager investors, tons of news coverage and lots of interest from big corporations looking for ways to make money in the immersive online social world.
Today, the roughly 250-person San Francisco company that operates Second Life, Linden Lab, is getting a different kind of attention following a 30 percent layoff – some 90 people out of 300 – in June, the resignation of former CEO Mark Kingdon a few weeks later, and a current report from private shares trading company SharesPost showing that Linden Lab’s value plunged by 21.4 percent – or $100 million – in just the last five months. What went wrong, and how dire is the situation?”

7. The Guardian (UK) – It’s dodgems on the streets with everyone gazing at mobile devices. “I don’t walk down the street any more: these days I swerve, bob and veer my way past most of the other people occupying it. Why don’t they look where they’re going? Or is it just me? A current TV ad imagines how funny it would be if car-driving behaviour were adopted by pedestrians. Sorry, bright adperson, but your fantasy is no fantasy: I already experience pavement rage, because traversing it has become a species of dodgems. The street has become an extension of the living-room, used for so much more than walking – lighting up, for example. Smokers, ejected from public buildings, labour under the delusion that outdoors is a giant extractor hood, discharging smells directly into the heavens. They niftily forget that minor natural element known as wind, which can blow with such precision that, without swift evasive action, we passersby can feel like those notorious beagles compelled to puff smoke not of our own producing.”

8. Financial Post (Canada) – Tweens & Technology: The tiny power shoppers. “Meet Andrew. At age nine, the sandy-haired boy from Markham, Ont., is already a savvy shopper of electronics. When his mother told him the Nintendo DSi game he wanted was too expensive, he pursued a new strategy. He told family and friends to forgo birthday and Christmas presents and buy him gift cards to put toward the new device. Now he saves for the accompanying games — most recently Super Mario Galaxy 2. Next on his wish list: the iPod Touch. “My aunt has one and let’s me play with it when she visits,” he says. Jackie Macdonald-Bartkiw, Andrew’s mom, figures that by Christmastime, he will be lobbying for more gift cards to buy his own touch technology. “I’m amazed at his patience … and persistence.”

9. Big Think (USA) – Can Hollywood Redesign Humanity. “Most people do not come to Hollywood for deep conversation, but as we explained with respect to “serious games,” the entertainment universe is producing an impressive array of products that can educate youth to think more constructively about real-world problems through experimenting with solutions in online environments. There is also a new breed of film-makers who are advancing the cause of techno-optimism in ways that contradict the dystopian visions of robots taking over the earth. When we convened a salon of film-makers, online game designers, branding executives, and media personalities to discuss this construction of ever more immersive realities, they provided not only deep conversation, but also a sophisticated and controversial view of how Hollywood has moved beyond vanity and celebrity worship towards “world-building” that can inspire progressive behavioral change.”

10. Computerworld (USA) – Rocker raises money for first album in Second Life. “Keiko Takamura, a San Francisco indie rocker, raised some of the money to record her album and built a following by playing concerts in Second Life. She uses a broad array of other social media to find listeners and sell her music. Keiko and other indie musicians are worth watching by businesspeople as well as music fans. The music business model has been turned upside down by the Internet, and indie musicians are leaders at using the net to build new ways of finding customers. Their techniques are often applicable to traditional business.”

1. The Guardian (UK) – Virtual worlds: is this where real life is heading? “Recently a man bought a space station for $330,000, while last month Small Planet Foods, a subsidiary of General Foods, introduced a new brand of organic blueberries. What have these two products got in common? Neither actually exist. Well, not except as pixels in the virtual worlds where they are traded. Only the money is real. The space station was sold in the virtual world Entropia Universe, which has its own economy and currency. The buyer, who converted his $300,000 into 3.3m PED (Project Entropia dollars), is convinced that virtual shops on his virtual space station will produce virtual profits that can be converted back into real dollars. The blueberries represent a “brand extension” of a product that exists in the real world as US company General Foods aims to establish a presence in FarmVille, a game which exists as an application on Facebook and which at its peak has had nearly 80 million players. It is a classic example of a new genre.”

2. The Royal Gazette (Bermuda) – 3D concept adapted for the wider arena . “The use of 3D worlds on the Internet has been evolving from the gaming sector to a more expansive leveraging of the technique. Last week I wrote about how Citzalia, a site I am working on as editor, uses virtual 3D as an innovative means of navigating through information and for social networking. Companies, non-profits, government and other entities should also consider using the concept of creating 3D virtual worlds as a means of attracting and engaging visitors. Above all, they should keep in mind the idea of allowing users to have fun.”

3. IEEE Spectrum (USA) – Reducing World of Warcraft’s Power Consumption. “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft consume a lot of their players’ time. They also consume a lot of energy, as more than a thousand servers can be required to create one game’s virtual worlds. Last year, Yeng-Ting Lee, a 26-year-old online game fanatic, began to wonder if there was an easy way to reduce their energy consumption. Lee, who is a research assistant at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan, says he has found a way to cut MMORPG power consumption in half. Last month he revealed the solution at the IEEE Cloud 2010 conference.”

4. Inforum (USA) – Video game industry tailoring more offerings to female players. “or years, video games have been marketed toward male players with ads that showcase unreal action sequences or alluring female figures guiding players through virtual worlds. But as the video game industry expands its consumer base, some female gamers are feeling a little less ignored by an industry that has realized not only men play their games. In fact, women make up 42 percent of the 215 million Americans who play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association.”

5. RTH Life (Switzerland) – Virtual reality you can touch. “Researchers at the Computer Vision Lab at ETH Zurich have developed a method with which they can produce virtual copies of real objects. The copies can be touched and even sent via the Internet. By incorporating the sense of touch, the user can delve deeper into virtual reality. Sending a friend a virtual birthday present, or quickly beaming a new product over to a customer in America to try out – it sounds like science fiction, but this is what researchers at the Computer Vision Lab want to make possible, with the aid of new technology. Their first step was to successfully transmit a virtual object to a spatially remote person, who could not only see the object, but also feel it and move it.”

6. Red Deer Advocate (Canada) – A virtual world to see, hear — and smell. “Virtual reality may seem all the more real in the future, with not only people’s sense of sight and hearing engaged, but also their sense of smell. A high school student from Elnora is part of the cutting edge research, having just worked on a project at the University of Alberta known as Smell-O-Vision. Ashley Brown, a Grade 12 student at Delburne Centralized School and the cyber school North-Star Christian Academy, was one of 60 high school students accepted into the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST) summer research program at the U of A.”

7.Computerworld (USA) – The (better) future of tech support. “Right now, getting help when something unusual goes wrong is a frustrating experience for customers. They’ve come to stereotype the experience as waiting endlessly on hold, deciphering strangely cheerful foreign accents, humoring technicians who are incapable of understanding — let alone answering — their questions, and taking time off to wait for a tech who doesn’t show. Tech support pros are just as frustrated, experiencing the same issues from their vendors’ tech support and dealing with users who start the interaction expecting nothing, despite their own cluelessness. But even with these drags on their morale, many sally forward and poke around cryptic forums, hunting for answers among the rants to find an answer for their frustrated users and reaching out to fellow support pros through social networks and the like.”

8. Chicago Tribune (USA) – Despite some blips, most see technology as boon for family life. “At first, Andrea Pryor admitted, she was a little nervous about installing a computer in her Chicago home. What exactly was this thing? What would it do to her family. Years later, she has her answer: It brought them closer. “It has kept us connected, with family scattered across the U.S.,” said Pryor, 57, a retired teacher. “I’m getting to watch my nephews, nieces and grandchildren grow up.”

9. The Guardian (UK) – How the internet is altering your mind. “Like nearly all the Guardian’s content, what you are about to read was – and this will hardly be a revelation – written using a computer connected to the internet. Obviously, this had no end of benefits, mostly pertaining to the relative ease of my research and the simplicity of contacting the people whose thoughts and opinions you are about to read. Modern communications technology is now so familiar as to seem utterly banal, but set against my clear memories of a time before it arrived, there is still something magical about, say, optimistically sending an email to a scientist in southern California, and then talking to him within an hour.”

10. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Linden Lab’s Value Down 21%, Teen Second Life To Close. “The value of Second Life publisher Linden Lab has plunged by 21.4% in the past five months on the private market, according to SharesPost. This drop in price has effectively sent the company’s value down by $100 million, with SharesPost now estimating Linden Lab’s value at only $271 million. The decline follows Linden’s announcement that it would cut 30% of its staff in June, shortly followed by the replacement of CEO Mark Kingdon with founder Philip Rosedale. Earlier today, the company also announced that it would shut down its Teen Second Life grid on December 31, 2010. Linden Lab was founded in 1999, while Second Life launched in 2003. Teen Second Life launched in 2005 as a solution for younger users who wanted to enjoy the virtual world but weren’t old enough to explore Second Life’s sometimes-adult grid freely. To compensate for Teen Second Life’s closure, Linden Lab will drop the minimum user age in Second Life to 16 on or before December 31, 2010. Accounts for 16 and 17-year-old Teen Second Life users will be transferred to Second Life’s Main Grid.”