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That’s QUT for YAWL in SL

October 24, 2008 by 1 Comment

The Smart Services Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) is an Australian initiative designed to improve the service industry in Australia. The CRC partnership exists between 10 major industry players and six Australian universities. Its aim is the creation of research-enabled commercial outcomes for its partners. The current 7-year budget amounts to $120 million, with a grant of $30.8 million from the Federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, and an investment of $38 million from the Queensland Government and its local partners (SAP, Suncorp and RACQ). The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is the largest academic contributor.

YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language), developed at the QUT, is one of the products that have been worked on as a part of the CRC initiative.

YAWL, “Yet Another Workflow Language”

Familiar with flow charts? Yes? That’s great, but will not help you here. Only a minority of control-flow patterns in workflow can be captured by classical flow charts. Nonetheless, they may be the first things you think of when confronted with a 2D YAWL control flow model – keep in mind that YAWL models are far more complex and sophisticated.

In the late 1990s, there were many workflow management systems around, each supporting a variety of languages. Created for the most part in isolation across industries, they used different concepts, different evaluation strategies, and different syntactic restrictions. It was difficult to compare one system to another – no single system could be used to encompass the full range of workflow possibilities.

The Workflow Patterns Initiative is a joint effort of Eindhoven University of Technology (led by Professor Wil van der Aalst) and QUT(led by Professor Arthur ter Hofstede). It was begun in about 1999. The control-flow perspective is one of several perspectives that can be distinguished in process-aware information systems – it captures aspects such as parallelism, choice and synchronisation. Originally 20 patterns were proposed for this perspective, however the latest iteration contains over 40 patterns. The patterns are language-independent, allowing an objective comparison between approaches to workflow management systems.

YAWL grew out of the Workflow Patterns Initiative.

YAWL’s original purpose was to act as a reference language. YAWL is a concise and precisely defined language that comprehensively supports many of the control-flow patterns.

“YAWL, like any other workflow management system, glues together people and applications in order to support processes as they may occur in businesses. It can offer work to the right people at the right time. Here it is important to understand the main perspectives one can have on a workflow:

1) control-flow perspective: what are the tasks involved and what is their order

2) data perspective: what information is involved and to what workflow components is this information visible

3) resource perspective: how is work distributed to the various participants (e.g. is it done on a pull-based or a push-based basis) and on what basis (e.g. a certain task may only be offered to those that play a certain role).

Workflow management has applications in many different domains.” – Professor Arthur ter Hofstede

YAWL Applications

YAWL4Film is currently being used with success in the Australian Film industry. Other YAWL applications are available for Business Process Management, the healthcare sector, and for product recall.

Dr Ross Brown and his team at QUT have been using YAWL to specify quests within online games – a game specific form of workflow – for some years now.

The YAWL – Second Life connection

“Once I had realised that you could link YAWL to a 3D environment for game control purposes, it became obvious that other areas could benefit if we used a more general environment such as Second Life.  So, this year we utilised Second Life’s service invocation interfaces to allow it to talk to YAWL via a custom service – YAWL has an SOA architecture amenable to the creation of custom services interfaces.  You can see some details about this project on my blog at http://bpmve.blogspot.com/2008/07/yawl-and-second-life-linked.html.  In the example we have the workflow tool controlling an avatar, animating a workflow describing the processes involved in film production.  The thing to note is that the avatar is controlled from outside of SL, it is not scripted within SL at all.” – Dr Ross Brown

YAWL comes with a visual editing tool with which to create workflows. Educational scenarios can effectively be created this way. The CRC project involves the creation of more such tools to allow educators to easily create lesson plans within digital environments like Second Life.

“We can also use YAWL to create virtual, training environments for industries such as health, mining or fire fighting where the actual danger is removed but people can train in a realistic environment.”  – Dr Ross Brown

Via QUT News.

Filed Under: Australian News, Education, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

VastPark and NICTA: Badumna beta

October 22, 2008 by Leave a Comment

The title of this story would have to be one of our most obtuse, but the story behind it is hopefully a little more transparent.

VastPark is a developing virtual world platform well known to regular readers. NICTA (National ICT Australia) also has a number of years pedigree in some of the technological underpinnings of virtual worlds. In the case of the collaboration with VastPark, peer to peer (P2P) is the focus. The joint project announced this week involves the release of the beta version of an MMO P2P engine, christened Badumna (which incidentally are a genus of spiders). It’s a promising development and a further shot in the arm for VastPark.

The issue of being able to have more than 50-60 people in one area of a virtual world is one that’s received a lot of attention. Some argue that having many hundreds or thousands or avatars in one smallish space would bring a much-needed buzz to popular virtual worlds. Others argue it’ll just become a crowded mess (imagine voice capabilities in such a scenario). What partnerships like this do is ensure that we’ll actually have the option of finding out what population level works best:

According to NICTA’s P2P Project Leader Dr Santosh Kulkarni, Badumna can support millions of users with minimal infrastructure. “It provides a significant competitive advantage over traditional network engines,” he maintains. Badumna has already been successfully integrated with the platform of 3-D virtual worlds platform provider VastPark.

Of course, this claim has been made before by multiple developers – a notable Australian example being Project Outback. That said, NICTA have serious credibility in their area and VastPark have a lot more development runs on the board than Project Outback ever did (though there was a NICTA connection involved there too).

I think it’s safe to say that P2P as virtual worlds network engine has plenty of life in it yet – check out the NCITA project page for more details.

Filed Under: Alternatives, Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

Linden Lab CEO: hey I’m in London!

October 20, 2008 by Leave a Comment

On the rarely updated Linden Lab blog, CEO Mark Kingdon has posted that he’s arrived in London for the Virtual Worlds London shindig.

The response on the blog from Second Life residents has been… lukewarm to say the least. I’m sure VW London’s organisers would have liked the announcement from Mr Kingdon more than 12 hours before he’s due to speak on “many of the initiatives I’ve spoken about in this space including our focus on improving overall stability, further tailoring the platform for our core audiences and enhancing the first hour experience for new Residents.”

Some predictions on the speech itself: it will cover the promise of virtual worlds, the improvements in usability to date, some veiled references to future developments and the announcement of SL servers on all continents by the end of 2008. Ok scratch that last one – do we really need SL servers in Antarctica?

Disclosure: we’re a media partner for Virtual Worlds London.

Update: a summary of the keynote can be found here.

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

October 20, 2008 by 1 Comment

1. The Industry Standard (Canada) – Virtual world advertising: A wasteful expense, or a bargain for marketers? “Are virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com about to feel a chill from advertisers? It depends who you talk with. This week, an article in the Wall Street Journal reported that marketers are cutting back on digital and “experimental” ad buys, including video game advertising, cell phone advertising, and virtual world advertising.”

2. Minneapolis Star Tribune (USA) – Game strives for Web success. “”I don’t think there’s any other field where you can find a failure rate this high and still find people willing to invest,” said Mark Jacobs, general manager of game studio EA Mythic. “The failure rate is unbelievable.” Jacobs was talking about his section of the video-game industry, the realm of online games where players pay a monthly fee to participate as characters in a virtual world. In the past 11 years, by his count, fewer than 10 titles have met some level of financial success. The number of expensive flops is a lot larger.”

3. nextgov (USA) – Web 2.0 technologies are seen as vital to attracting younger employees . “The federal government must adapt and embrace Web 2.0 technologies such as virtual worlds, wikis and social networks to attract and retain younger employees, because the technologies are here to stay, two federal knowledge management practitioners said in a presentation in Washington on Thursday. Comment on this article in The Forum.Speaking at a conference on knowledge management and business intelligence organized by the Digital Government Institute, Giora Hader, the Federal Aviation Administration’s knowledge architect, said agencies must embrace the world of social networking and collaborative technologies or risk losing out on a generation of new workers who are needed to fill gaps left by the upcoming wave of retirements.”

4. CNET (USA) – Hello Kitty gamers take on New York. “If your kids start to show serious signs of loving New York and you don’t know why, this might be the reason. Sanrio Digital, maker of the Hello Kitty Online 3D virtual world that’s currently in beta, announced Friday the game’s largest in-game event: the building of New York City. Players of the Hello Kitty Online Founders’ Beta can take part in a series of quests to collect and organize materials for the building of a new New York area that will appear in the next phase of the game–and will undoubtedly be far more pink than the real Big Apple.”

5. BBC News (UK) – The Cost of Warcraft. If you’ve got any bandwidth limit on your internet use, you may have bust through it this week, especially if you have a teenage son. Why? Well it could be the cost of war – or rather World of Warcraft.
I’ve been keeping a close eye on my bandwidth use at home because I keep breaking through my 25gb per month limit. When I signed up to my ISP I thought that would be ample, but then found that we were using as much as 1gb a day, which seemed a lot. Then on Wednesday this week we broke all records, with more than 2gb downloaded. I was away from home, my wife’s surfing habits are mostly limited to reading obscure economics blogs, so the spotlight fell on our teenage son, who spends a certain amount of time online in his room in the loft.”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – Ubisoft Opens Far Cry 2 Space In PlayStation Home. “Ubisoft’s just-launched Far Cry 2 “space” in PlayStation Home’s closed beta in North America and Europe is the first third-party game area to hit Sony’s PlayStation 3-based virtual world, the company says. The Far Cry 2 space in Home features details taken from the game universe and promises it “will become a fully-interactive experience” and “continue to grow and evolve alongside PlayStation Home.”

7. Express Computer (India) – Got your enterprise avatar? ” A Balasubramanian on why enterprises should experiment with virtual worlds, but look for community benefits rather than commerce. Returning, once again, to the hustle and bustle of the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE), you Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, are in the jaunty company of Danny DeVito, your CTO at Baffle.”

8. LA Times (USA) – PlayStation Home: Sony’s open house. “This fall, Sony will throw open the doors to PlayStation Home, an ambitious project to turn its online game network for PS3 console players into a lifelike 3-D virtual world where people can cruise around with their avatars. Sony has mentioned the project in past years, but had not released details. Last week, the company held an open house to give reporters an early tour. The software gives players the ability to create highly customized, realistic avatars. Each player also will be given a waterfront condo with a walk-in closet where they can try on various accessories purchased at Home’s virtual mall.”

9. SOA World (USA) – iTech Fitness and Softkinetic Collaborate on Groundbreaking Active Gaming Project for XRKade. “iTech Fitness, the industry leader in active gaming development, and Softkinetic, the leading 3D gesture recognition software provider, today announced a partnership to develop the future of active gaming experiences. For the first time ever, users can exercise in a virtual world by simply moving their bodies, without the use of any game controller or peripheral.”

10. Daily Yomiuri (Japan) – ‘Born-digital generation wants to share’ “If you haven’t yet digested the concept of massive, multiplayer online games, or MMOs, then watch out: James Crowley has announced the advent of what he calls MMO 2.0. And if you can’t guess what that means, you probably weren’t “born digital.” Crowley is the president of Turbine, Inc., which runs such MMOs as Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. In an Oct. 10 speech at the Tokyo Game Show in Chiba, Crowley called MMOs the place where social networks, virtual worlds and conventional online games overlap. But he also said that MMOs would have to reinvent themselves to appeal to the new “born digital” generation.”

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds, Virtual worlds in the media Tagged With:

Weekend Whimsy

October 18, 2008 by Leave a Comment

1. Obama in Second Life

2. Torben Asp at Skatepark of Tampa

3. SecondLife: Moondance

Filed Under: User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters

October 17, 2008 by 2 Comments

It’s been a great couple of weeks for interesting new Australian presences in Second Life. Last weekend, ‘Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters‘ launched. It’s a fascinating take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth character, a “timely use of pop culture as an adaptive bridge between classic texts and new media technology”.

The first five minutes of my wanderings around the build were reminiscent of the last Australia Council funded build I wandered around, Babelswarm. In this case, the New Media Consortium provided part of the funding as well. The similarity isn’t in relation to content, it’s the quality of the content. As Macduff says in the play: “The life o’ the building!”.

Three Australian collaborators were involved with the project: multimedia artist Kate Richards, theatre and film director Kerreen Ely Harper and Angela Thomas, a writer and educationalist.

For me, the power of the experience is that there’s plenty of room left for self-interpretation of the intent. Having studied Macbeth a (cough) few years ago, the strength of the themes from that work are strong. English teachers take note: this is an obvious boon for the student analysing Macbeth – the immersiveness and open interpretation provides one mighty playground for discussion of the play itself.

Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:
More needs she the divine than the physician.
God, God forgive us all! Look after her;
Remove from her the means of all annoyance,
And still keep eyes upon her. So, good night:
My mind she has mated, and amazed my sight.
I think, but dare not speak.

I think it’s fair to say that for most student, Shakespeare can be one of the more forbidding hurdles to overcome, and initiatives like this can only help lower those hurdles. Kudos to the creators, the NMC and to the Australia Council, who have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to virtual worlds as artistic platform.

Check it out in-world

Filed Under: Art, Australian News, Education, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , , ,

Australian Accountants enter Second Life

October 15, 2008 by 2 Comments

Lee Hopkins (SL: Lee Laperriere), an online communications strategist and Lindy McKeown (SL: Decka Mah), an educational consultant, presented at the Chartered Practising Accountants Congress. Both are well known Australian Second Life residents.

It was the first event in Second Life the accountants peak body has run, and by all accounts it was a success (geddit?).

Lee has the full story on his blog – kudos to CPA Australia for taking the plunge with the Second Life session. When true ROI is demonstrated with virtual worlds, the bean counters themselves will be leading the charge if CPA Australia have anything to do with it.

Filed Under: Australian News, Business, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

AFTRS: directing the future

October 14, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Gary Hayes has amazing talent. As with so many people who are masterful in their field, he can make the difficult look effortless. However, this time it’s not an attractive and engaging machinima or build that has me excited, but Gary’s words about the new diploma courses being run at AFTRS.

Forget the glitz and glam, ignore the special effects of the promo videos if you are able. Look, feel and presentation are required elements of film, animation, games and virtual worlds. Nonetheless, the promo video for these courses overshadows something that I feel is of far greater importance: these one year graduate diplomas in Games Design (Directing) and Virtual Worlds (Directing) have great technical depth.  Each has been rigorously designed, will be delivered with the intensity and creativity of amazing mentors, and behind each stands a wealth of knowledge concerning both presentation and mechanics.

The new courses will build upon the work performed within the Animation (Directing) course and the LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production) initiative.

What does ‘directing’ refer to?

The directing portion of the course titles refers to the fact that participants will be taught, in addition to the technical and business aspects, creative leadership skills, and the skills of innovation and entrepreneurship. Students will be expected to pioneer new ideas and thoughts, to create games and worlds never seen before, and they will be mentored in these endeavors. Originality, and the ability to push the envelope, are key. Students must be seen to be creating the future, not just contributing their small part to a company or the community. The focus of the courses is innovation: brand-new genres and interactive, film-like spaces – things which rarely even pass go in the risk-adverse computer games industry.

Games Design (Directing)

In the context of this course, a ‘game’ is defined as “authored or artificially constructed play”. Game formats and genres of a multitude of types will be considered in the course, from casual to serious/simulations, from console to online multi-player, from children to adult, and so on through hundreds of sub-categories. New gaming tools, such as emotional AIs, natural generative dialogue and realistic motion will be covered also. Significantly, game theory will be covered in-depth, and will be given as much importance as the creation of dramatic depth and visual intensity. Students will be expected to study and understand such things as gameplay and usability before they are let loose with visual and audio tools.

“We love games that have play and story at their core and not just great graphics or deep sound.” – Gary Hayes.

Here is an indicative list of the types of topics that will be covered:

Games Story, Character Design, Games in Motion, Storytelling Essentials, Game Level Design, Mechanics of Play, Cross-Media Incubator, Designing Story Worlds, Acting for Animators, Directing Voice Performers, Genre Workshop, Innovation and Form, The Business of Games.

Virtual Worlds (Directing)

Students will be learning to construct virtual worlds. Social worlds and MMORPGS will be covered, as will film pre-visualisation tools and CG-animated story worlds. Film/virtual world cross-overs will be covered in depth.

“We will also have lecturers from across the Australian and international metaverse industry involved in Virtual Worlds who understand financing, finding your market and target users and of course insights into the technical deployment of large scale community driven worlds. So from the outset students will understand how decisions made at napkin, sketching or proof of concept stages can have enormous impact further down the production chain. Each course will have several small incubator projects but the final major project spread over 13+ weeks, will include extra help in project managing rapid and complex productions.” – Gary Hayes.

Here is an indicative list of the types of topics that will be covered:

Designing Story Worlds, Virtual Camera, Social Virtual Worlds, Storytelling Essentials, Virtual Life, Cross-Media Incubator, The Avatar and Interface, World Design, Acting for Animators, Genre Workshop, Directing Voice Performers, Innovation and Form, Episodic Storytelling

“Eventually games are going to be designed in the same virtual space as the film will be.” – Peter Giles.

An especially exciting part of the two courses is the space in which they overlap. Components of each of the Games Design and Virtual Worlds courses will also focus on film production, the involvement of games and virtual worlds in film production, and the cross-pollination between games, virtual worlds and films.

“What makes these courses unique will be the cross-over with the film craft and directing parts of the school.” – Gary Hayes.

A range of professional associates will be employed during the period of the courses, including Matt Costello (Doom, Pirates of the Caribbean), John Buchanan (ex EA Games Research and Development) and Deborah Todd (author of Games: from BlueSky to GreenLight).

The one caveat I would like to issue about these courses concerns their length – just 32 weeks each. Courses run by the AFTRS are well known for their intense nature, and these will not differ in that manner. If you do join the student body, don’t plan on having any sick days – legitimate or otherwise.

See here for the video promo for the Games Design (Directing) and Virtual Worlds (Directing) diploma courses.

See here for a GameFilmWorld crossover video which Hayes produced to highlight the cross-over between the three.

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Superstruct: six weeks to save the world

October 14, 2008 by 1 Comment

Superstruct homepage

Play the game. Invent the future.

This is the tag line for the MMO forecasting game Superstruct, an alternative reality game set in the future, developed by a team at The Institute for the Future (IFTF). It’s a SF game, where SF has the original meaning of speculative fiction – crises are speculated upon by the game’s designers, and the objective is to speculate upon solutions to those crises in a collaborative manner.

The game launched on October 6 and will run for only 6 weeks. The IFTF, based in Palo Alto, California, is “an independent nonprofit research group.” Assisting organisations to prepare for the future is a major aspect of the work they do. The game draws on their knowledge and foresight to place crises in front of players, and to judge when players have made substantive leaps forward towards the game’s goals.

Superstruct is billed as “the thinking person’s MMO” – strictly, this means that people who get enjoyment out of thinking will enjoy and appreciate the game (there are no orcs to kill here). Nonetheless, it’s important not to be too off put by this description, because no one player is expected to present complete solutions alone, and because as we now know there’s more to intelligence than scoring high on IQ tests. Within the context of the game, people who are able to collaborate well, to get along well with other people, and to bring teams together, will also fare well.

Su`per`struct´ v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation.

Humans have been superstructing for centuries. You could look at it as “standing on the shoulders of giants.” We build upon what our ancestors have done before us. In times of crisis and trouble, humans pull together and launch off from the failures and successes of our predecessors – hopefully this tendency, coupled with the power of our current technologies, will help us survive the super-threats facing us in the near future of Superstruct.

Super-threats

The super-threats are a comprehensive listing of specific crises the world is likely to face in game in the years following 2019.

  • Quarantine covers the global response to declining health and pandemic disease, including the current Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ReDS) crisis.
  • Ravenous focuses on the imminent collapse of the global food system, as well as debates over industrial vs. ecological agricultural models, and basic issues of access, energy, and carbon.
  • Power Struggle tracks the results of energy resource peaks and the shifts in international power as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions.
  • Outlaw Planet embodies the volatile mix of new forms of surveillance, transparency, civil rights, and access to information as people work out new rules for human security.
  • Generation Exile follows the massive “diaspora of diasporas” underway globally, as the number of refugees and migrants skyrockets in the face of climate change, economic disruption, and war.

Keeping score

As the game is played out, three things are being tracked: how many people are playing the game, how many “survivability points” have been earned by players, and how many years are left before humans face extinction. The score is a combination of these three items – the higher the score, the longer the human race has left to live on this planet.

“Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.”

Filed Under: Alternatives, General News, Virtual Worlds

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

October 13, 2008 by Leave a Comment

1. TMCnet (USA) – Diabetes UK: Second Life launch for diabetes campaign. “Diabetes UK has this week launched its Silent Assassin campaign’ within the virtual 3-D world of Second Life. The charity launched both its headquarters and the campaign in the virtual world that boasts 15 million residents’ to coincide with its biggest ever UK-wide campaign – created to raise awareness of the seriousness of diabetes.”

2. CCTV (China) – Beyond space and time: 3-D Forbidden City. “A three dimensional Forbidden City is now open in a virtual world. People can get a glimpse of the imperial palace and experience the lives of ancient emperors without having to be there. And the interactive platform allows online tourists to take on an ancient identity.”

3. Herald Sun (Australia) – Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s Playstation launching rival ‘virtual worlds. “Microsoft and Sony are taking their battle for gaming supremacy into cyberspace, launching competing virtual worlds.
Microsoft announced its New Xbox Experience at this weekend’s Tokyo Games Show.”

4. DMNews (USA) – Machinima is a futuristic, viral option for marketers. “Although still in its infancy, machin ima — animated films created by using a number of different game or virtual world engines — is rapidly emerging as a surpris ingly effective new tool for marketers. Currently, most machinima is produced through the online virtual world Second Life. However, it is expanding to include other online games and virtual worlds.”

5. Stars and Stripes (USA) – Game developers tap into social network. “As the Internet continues to increase in complexity and social networking grows in popularity, game developers are working to utilize the full potential of these technologies. “Social technology has fundamentally altered the means by which we communicate,” Jim Crowley, president and CEO of Turbine, said during a presentation Friday at the Tokyo Game Show.”

6. VentureBeat (USA) – Twofish raises $4.5M to create economies for virtual worlds. “Twofish has raised $4.5 million in a second round of funding for its business of creating the economic infrastructure behind virtual worlds. The deal is another indication that the virtual goods economy is heating up, even as the real world economy spirals downward.”

7. Gaywired (USA) – A Virtual Lesbian Life: Revisiting Second Life. “Although I dabbled in the massive online world of Second Life back when it was first becoming really popular 3 or 4 years ago, I didn’t have time to really explore and didn’t end up playing for long. It was not until Showtime made a big splash in SL by creating a virtual L Word island in the game a couple of years back that I ventured back in for another go. My passion for the immense virtual world comes and gos, but there is no denying that Second Life is an addition that’s hard to kick.”

8. bMighty (USA) – Welcome To Fantasy Island. “With fewer dollars to spend in the real world, consumers have been hanging out in virtual worlds — where their money goes farther, according to operators of such sites. Take Habbo, a self-described hangout for teens that charges a small fee for access to specific site features. Visitors are spending twice the amount of time on Habbo than in days past, the site’s EVP told Forbes.com. U.S. users, who account for 25% of Habbo’s 10 million customer base, spend around $18 per month buying virtual items. You do the math.”

9. Pittsburgh Post Gazette (USA) – The Next Page: The triumph of the gamer. “If he were alive today, Shakespeare might very well have rephrased his famous observation stating “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” by describing this worldly existence of ours as more closely resembling a videogame than a theatrical production.”

10. BBC News (UK) – Virtual worlds carve out new path. “If you are walking with orcs in the World of Warcraft or setting up a business on planet Calypso, the real world is probably very far from your mind. But for attendees at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London this week, the question of how to bridge the gap with the real world is a very pertinent one. As well as gaining an audience beyond the core teenage male gamer, virtual worlds with real world connections offer a whole new way to make money.”

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds, Virtual worlds in the media Tagged With:

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