President-Elect Barack Obama is assembling several groups to help him approach his upcoming term's technological challenge. While it may not mean anything in the long run, it's interesting to note that there are several virtual worlders making an appearance. Leading...

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Here's a neat bit of augmented reality for a Monday morning. Boffswana, an Australian interactive agency, put together this video of a 3D character that appears in a webcam video simply by placing a sheet of paper with a symbol...

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A 22-year-old British man, Rachata Burasite, was caught this summer Canada where he tried to meet with a 13-year-old girl he had spent two years grooming, at least in part, in Gaia Online. It's not clear from the story just...

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Forterra Systems announced today that it had been contracted by the Program Executive for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation (PEO-STRI) to integrate its OLIVE virtual world platform with the U.S. Army's One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF) system to support military training. The...

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Filed under: Betas, News items, Second Life

For those of you who are keen on hands-free avatar expressiveness in the virtual environment of Second Life comes a surprise third-party viewer from vr-wear.com. This beta viewer for Windows or Mac OSX uses a camera to track your head and expressions, and convey that to your avatar.

At present, it is all a little rudimentary, and there isn't any back-end support for sending much in the way of ad-hoc avatar motion through the Second Life servers, so the system is limited to what can be supported. At present, that appears to be lip-sync, nodding and head-shaking, surprise and smiling, and head-tilting to the left or right.

Continue reading Face and head tracking for Second Life avatars

Face and head tracking for Second Life avatars originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

 

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I recently joked that Second Life's growth doldrums might only end if President Barack Obama himself set up an official headquarters in the metaverse. That seemed quite unlikely just a few weeks ago, but increasingly, I'm not so sure. Last...
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by Sigmund Leominster There is a world of difference between the real world press and the Second Life press. Forgetting this can be fatal, as is evidenced by the recent departure of two journalistic organs, the Avastar and Reuters Second...
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Sponsored by the CG Society of Digitial Artists, the Steampunk Myths and Legends Contest is taking entries for the next couple months, and for the many inventors of Caledon, New Babbage, and the rest of Second Life's steampunk societies, it...
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Welcome to the Treasure Hunt for the October issue of Prim Perfect magazine!  I will be your guide as we tour the grid searching for FOURTEEN items offered by talented designers and store owners.  To complete the Treasure Hunt challenge, you need to visit each store, find the featured item, and note its prim count.  [...]
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[RESOLVED 6:20PM Pacific ] The server is now up and running smoothly and affected residents should now be able to log in. [UPDATE 5:00PM Pacific ] Server recovery is taking a little bit longer than anticipated, but we are still expecting a resolution soon. [UPDATE 3:56PM Pacific ] Our technicians estimate that the inventory server will be [...]
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Filed under: Second Life, Free-to-play, Browser, Casual, Home, Whirled

There seems be an endless tide of online games and virtual worlds being made available to us, with more always on the way. Some of them are well-known and need little introduction, such as Second Life, Playstation Home, and Facebook games, to name just a few. But there's plenty more out there, some of which falls into the standard 'MMO' category, although it's a label that we find is steadily blurring as time goes on.

Darren Gladstone, Senior Writer at PC World, has put together "The Social Gaming Guide" for his Casual Friday column. In it he explores some of the mainstays of social gaming like the options found within Second Life and Facebook, but also sheds light on some lesser known alternatives. Gladstone discusses some of the choices gamers have with The Casual Collective, which he describes as "a cool casual-gaming waterhole created by the minds behind DTD," or Desktop Tower Defense. He looks at Whirled, an open-source gaming community which is home to Flash MMOs. "For players, Whirled is an awesome collection of hundreds of games, broken out by category and just waiting for you to jump in," Gladstone writes. Forthcoming Facebook integration will also add more dimensions to gameplay at Whirled.

Continue reading Expanding choices in social gaming and Flash MMOs

Expanding choices in social gaming and Flash MMOs originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

 

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[UPDATE 1:21 PM] Payments are tentatively working, continuing to check into the source of the issue. [3:02AM] Currently there are no updates to this issue. We will let you know of any changes when it is available. [UPDATE 1:22AM] We are aware this remains to be an issue for some residents and are looking into this. As [...]
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Press Release from Karuna: Thanks to a generous grant from the National Library of Medicine, a brand new island dedicated to HIV/AIDS education, outreach, and support will open in Second Life on December 1 - World AIDS Day, 2008. Christened Karuna, a word taken from an early Indo-Aryan language, the name of the island embodies the desire [...]
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Filed under: Culture, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds

It's considered to be a vast expanse of digital territory whose growth far outpaces the number of people actually using it. Huge tracts of it are completely abandoned wastelands, failed venues and disused stores. Parts of it are struggling venues trying to attract visitors. A few places are consistently busy, but they also bring the risk of abusive and disruptive people, who get their jollies from messing things up for others.

Advertising -- often quite intrusive -- is everywhere. At any moment you could be confronted by imagery of penises or of distasteful sexual practices. Committed users are freaks, and successful ones are geeks and enough people tend to choose anonymity that you're never really sure who you're talking to.

Sure there's businesses using it, commerce being done, and plenty of educational institutions who can no longer live without it, but that all seems just a small part of it compared to the time-wasting, boring, and sexual aspects doesn't it?

You all know the place we're talking about, right?

Continue reading The digital wilderness

The digital wilderness originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

 

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Our intrepid reporter, Qwis Greenwood, has been busy supplying clues that will help you win our Treasure Hunt, but there are some other fabulous prizes on offer this month too, before our closing date of 6th December 2008. First of all, there’s the Star Competition from our October magazine with the opportunity to win our fabulous [...]
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Looking for engaging discussion with like minded virtual worlds professionals? These are some of the recent topics currently being discussed in our virtualworldsnews.com group on LinkedIn: > Black holes in the VW universe > Funding for a new world project...

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Lingo Media Corporation announced this week that Mercedes-Benz (China) had signed a $100,000 contract to act as the launch sponsor for Speak2Me. Speak2Me is an English-language learning service that allows "users to engage in a virtual world tour [...] guided...

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In a feature on Home, Sony's virtual world for the PlayStation 3, IGN talks with Capcom Senior Director of Communications and Community Chris Kramer about why the video game developer wanted to get involved in the social sphere. Kramer compares...

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Metaversum announced yesterday a partnership with Bigpoint to bring the browser-based games specialist inside of the mirror world of Twinity. Bigpoint's 3D space will be a place for fans to socialize, learn about Bigpoint news and offerings, and take place...

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The University of Kansas Medical Center has begun using Second Life for training. More info.Even though Home is still in closed beta, promotions are underway for the upcoming Watchmen film. More info.The Department of Art at the University of Kansas...

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Why is LL powerless to remove “friendly greetings” left by Torley Linden’s wife Ravenelle? by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk Linden wife and contractor Ravenelle's megaprim wall blocks the Bear InfoHub view of one resident's business When you teleport to...
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As the Northern Hemisphere slowly tilts toward short days and cold, snowy landscapes, our minds inevitably turn to thoughts of togetherness. Once again, it is time for Second Life’s annual celebration of all that is Winter. Winterfaire is our chance to gather for long nights, blinky lights, hot drinks and gifts in mysterious boxes. We will [...]
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Hello from Support! We are pleased to announce our new German office hours for outworld support. If your preferred language is German then we have the support for you! Monday through Friday from 08:30 to 19:30 our German support agents will be available to help you with your non-technical questions. Premium and Concierge customers have access [...]
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If you know Spanish and Japanese-speakin...
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Welcome to the Treasure Hunt for the October issue of Prim Perfect magazine!  I will be your guide as we tour the grid searching for FOURTEEN items offered by talented designers and store owners.  To complete the Treasure Hunt challenge, you need to visit each store, find the featured item, and note its prim count.  [...]
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Doreen Garrigus created an avatar that matched her real life height of 5'2", which is roughly in the average range for women-- but in Second Life, made her seem like a midget. (Here she is at left.) "The default avatars...
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by Lavinia Carver While I was browsing around the other day, something just caught my eye. According to the advertisement, it was the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in Second Life. Now, at first I was skeptical. I thought, "Come on,...
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This is an MP3 link to a voice interview with AM Radio, interviewd by Amy Freelunch for the Arthole podcast/live streaming radio show-- evidently the first time the acclaimed metaverse artist has publicly linked his expressions in Second Life to...
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Azdel Slade and Lanna in the SL version of the RL performance lab Charlanna Beresford’s weekly round-up of upcoming SL events… Becoming Dragon is a mixed reality, durational performance taking place both in Second Life and at University of California...
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Thanksgiving's the day when Uncle Hamlet bangs the table and insists on asking this question to every reader-- and you don't get pumpkin pie until you answer.
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Ms. Mirabeau's "Violin" came out of an art gallery challenge with "Body Parts" as a theme (and perhaps some unconscious evoking of the surrealist Man Ray), and there's such fine detail to it, you definitely want to see the large...
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by Kris Dibou In the virtual life you've led You're neither living, nor are dead You've met them all but met no one Drifting under the pixel sun. And as you tire of this place The sun that doesn't burn...
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This is the second installment of “Stories from Second Life,” an occasional series of profiles of the people behind Second Life innovations, and the tangible benefits that these individuals and their businesses have brought to both the virtual and the real worlds. Hadrian Yorke rezzed on June 26, 2003 and later Edgware Marker (real life name [...]
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Last month NASA announced that it had selected three proposals to hear for its upcoming educational virtual world. It appears a decision has been made. We were passed what seems to be, though we haven't been able to confirm, an...

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Sun Inc. [Google translation], the Japanese company that announced a mobile client for Second Life last year (not Sun Microsystems), has gone bankrupt, reports Mindblizzard. It appears (the site is in Japanese) that Sun had just signed a partnership last...

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Meez CEO Sean Ryan blogged this week about a new project for the avatar-based network and virtual world. While users could already add YouTube channels to their private rooms, now Meez has partnered with Hulu to provide more options for...

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Although CEO Mark Kingdon has spoken extensively about Linden Lab's commitment to the enterprise and identified it and education as two major use cases for the Second Life Grid, the third, and apparently largest, is still individual consumers. In an...

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[Sometimes you only have to be patient and wait … I have been looking for quite some time for a woman with a darker skin. This is about diversity, right? All I found was girls meeting all bad clichés –...
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When Microsoft launched its New Xbox Experience last week, it brought a host of new features, but one of the most visible was the addition of avatars for users' identities. While Rare designed the avatars and is readying to roll...

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Past4Ward announced this week that it had licensed Rome Reborn for use in a supplemental educational platform, games, and virtual worlds. I haven't written anything about Rome Reborn because, so far, it's been more about mapping and building a detailed...

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M Linden here. Greetings everyone! For those of our Resident population who celebrate Thanksgiving, I’d like to wish you a happy and joyous holiday! It’s a time to count our blessings and offer thanks for all the good that has come our way. I can speak for all of Linden Lab when I say we are immensely [...]
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