Diving into a virtual world? Better plan ahead, report says
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A new report advises companies to prepare strategies that take into account their goals and projected costs before foraying into virtual worlds.
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Retailers must take advantage of virtual worlds and mobile technology to stay competitive.
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Just before U.S. financial markets were roiled by a global credit squeeze this summer, an equally dramatic financial crisis threatened "Second Life," the much-hyped online world.
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3D Connexion introduces a new peripheral that helps users navigate virtual 3D spaces.
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By Jackie Burrell, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.  May 29--Fearful parents may conjure up images of trench-coated predators trolling the Web, but the virtual world their teens actually inhabit is more like the soda shop of yesteryear or the mall -- a place to hang with friends.
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'All your Lindens are belong to us' More than two months after security researchers released exploit code that steals money from Second Life users, residents of the virtual world remain vulnerable to similar hacks, the researchers say.â¦
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Technologists have long dreamed of using the Internet to send data about consumer products to shoppers in real time, wherever they happen to be. Researchers at Microsoft Corp. claim they're getting closer to making that happen.
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TechWeb - IBM will allow non-IBMers to traipse through the 3D replicas of its real world premises that are located in the virtual world of Second Life.
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Autonomy&#39;s ZANTAZ division said Wednesday its e-discovery software can now find information stored in virtual environments.The functionality comes in the form of a new module for the company&#39;s Introspect product, according to Nicole Eagan, Autonomy&#39;s chief marketing officer. The module can search multiple virtual file servers running a number of operating systems, freeing up IT shops from doing the work manually, according to the company.Given the &quot;extreme&quot; type of rulings that have occurred in the e-discovery realm, such as one court&#39;s order that a company preserve its RAM data, virtualized information should undoubtedly factor into companies&#39; efforts to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure concerning electronically stored information, Eagan said.The company said it supports the product&#39;s use in a range of virtual environments, including VMware, Microsoft, Parallels, VirtualBox, Virtual Iron, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, and VirtualLogix VLX.Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, said the new capability holds value but perhaps only for customers with more drastic needs.&quot;Basically, if you&#39;re going through e-discovery, you want to &quot;wall off&quot; the relevant data (put it &#39;on hold&#39;),&quot; he said Wednesday. &quot;Virtualization is a good way to do this as you can put a virtual machine on a server and prevent others from getting to it.&quot;An IT shop could also put data in a secured repository and add yet another layer of security by putting the repository in a virtual setting, he added.&quot;Autonomy says they can make these different virtual machines look like one environment,&quot; he added. &quot;This is a valuable feature, but this is a niche capability as few companies would have this complex an e-discovery infrastructure.&quot;Eagan acknowledged that the new capability might find its first adopters among larger enterprises. &quot;That&#39;s where it will start, that&#39;s where litigation is most prominent,&quot; she said.She declined to provide specific pricing information.
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Newbie to the virtual world tries to find her way around the vast continent.
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DALLAS, Texas - Taking a step into the new frontier, NASA Ames Research Center, under the direction of Simon &quot;Pete&quot; Worden, has launched an island in Second Life, an online 3-D virtual world created, shaped, and owned by its participants.
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IBM is building a virtual world to help its employees collaborate.
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RatePoint is extending its rating system to residents of the Second Life online city, who can now determine which virtual neighbors to play and work with.
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Despite the recent failure of a Second Life-based virtual bank, financial experiments continue in the popular virtual world. The latest: A Singapore-based credit card you can use within Second Life.
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Walking past a crack in a wall in the computer game Broken Sword, players feel a draft of air in the real world. When a virtual plane flies by on the screen, a strategically timed breeze -- generated by a set of fans parked next to the monitor -- tries to make gamers feel as if they're standing next...
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(InfoWorld) - When Intel looks to the next few years of computing, the dollar signs look a lot better in three dimensions, full motion, and high definition. The rise of what Intel calls the 3-D Web will transform the way people use the Internet with a far richer experience, exemplified today by Second Life but turning more realistic and being deployed in medicine and business, CTO Justin Rattner said in a last-day keynote address at theÂ Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The best news for the chip giant, however, is how much computing power all this will take. "This may be the killer app of killer apps," Rattner told reporters after they keynote. "As people demand a more immersive, a more realistic experience, they're just going to push the computing demands to unprecedented levels." The pressure on central and graphics processors has already soared as Internet use expands from traditional Web pages to applications like Google Maps, Google Earth, multiplayer online role-playing games, and Second Life. Going from surfing the traditional Web to traversing Second Life can increase CPU load by three times and graphics processing load by 20 times, he said. Servers need to work harder, too. A server that could support 2,500 concurrent players of the online game World of Warcraft, for example, could only support 160 Second Life participants, Rattner said. Rattner's keynote was colorful and entertaining for an IDF presentation, full of animation and simulations, but he outlined how much farther this richer experience has to go. For example, the kind of realism people expect from movies requires shadows and reflections that move with objects in a scene, he said. Daniel Pohl, a research scientist at Intel, demonstrated high-definition environments in the game Quake that included those elements and others. They demanded nearly all the processing power of a server with dual quad-core Intel x5365 chips. In medicine, doctors are aiming to allow surgery on virtual patients. With current technology, they can simulate cutting a rectangular patch of skin and opening it up in real time, but it would take far more processing power to do the same with a curved piece of skin or something like a cleft palate, according to Joseph Teran, a UCLA assistant professor who participated in the keynote. Other challenges for making the 3-D Web a reality include user interface and standardization, Rattner said. Tasks that take computer artists hours, such as creating shadows or reflections, need to be automated so that the average person can create user-generated content in an elaborate online world. Humans also need a better interface with the online world, Rattner said. He demonstrated the SpaceNavigator from Logitech's 3DConnexion division, which can be pushed and pulled to interact with a virtual environment, and the Novint Falcon, a three-dimensional game controller with force feedback. In addition, the mostly proprietary world of virtual worlds needs to embrace common standards so that, for example, avatars from one world can enter another, Rattner said.
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(InfoWorld) - Although virtual environments are still at an early stage in development and adoption, many companies are already dabbling in one or more virtual worlds or closely observing them prior to getting their feet wet. Businesses that may have been slow to embrace the Internet are keen this time around to actively engage with the technology before it becomes mainstream. "'I don't get it, but I know I should get it,'" is what businesses tend to tell Sandra Kearney, global director, emerging 3D Internet at IBM, when she asks them about virtual worlds. "They say, 'I missed the Internet; I don't want to miss this too,' " she said during a panel discussion to debate virtual worlds and their business value at a joint IBM and MIT Media Labs conference held Friday. Auto maker Toyota is already using virtual worlds as a way to get preteens and teenagers interested in its Scion entry-level car brand, which is targeted at younger buyers. "We've made a fairly significant six-figure investment in virtual communities across different worlds," said Adrian Si, interactive marketing manager for Scion at Toyota. For instance, Toyota is the exclusive supplier of virtual Scion cars in Numedeon's Whyville educational virtual world for children aged 8 to 15 and provides them with information about car financing. Tweens are already thinking about what car they might buy, and Toyota hopes that giving them a positive experience with its cars in virtual worlds might translate into them or their parents buying vehicles from the vendor down the road. Good buzz about a product can go a long way, Si believes. Only a few years old, Toyota's Scion brand is one with which the company can afford to take risks that the auto maker couldn't with its other much more established brands, Si said. Toyota got interested in virtual worlds at the same time that the companies behind such communities were coming to the auto maker to see if it was interested in funding them. As well as Whyville, Toyota is promoting its Scion brand in Linden Research's Second Life and is about to do the same in Gaia Interactive's Gaia Online teen virtual world. PepsiCoÂ has yet to experiment with virtual worlds, but is keeping an eye on the space. "We're intrigued by it and are actively monitoring it," said Julius Akinyemi, director of emerging technologies at the beverage and snack vendor. Like Toyota, PepsiCo is particularly attracted by how much input users have in creating their virtual environments and the ability to directly interface with and influence those individuals. One area where PepsiCo thinks it might look to engage with the residents of virtual worlds is in soliciting their input on new products, according to Akinyemi. The vendor would hope to do more codevelopment of new beverages and snacks as well as create quick marketing buzz on new offerings, he said. There need to be more tools available in virtual worlds to make such development and marketing efforts easier, Akinyemi noted, along with a general move to simplify the process for anyone to enter any virtual environment. Building bridges between the real world and virtual environments will become increasingly important in guaranteeing a successful virtual presence for a company, IBM's Kearney said. She pointed to what the Ganz gift company has done with its popular Webkinz plush toys. Children who own one of the toys receive a code to enter the Webkinz virtual world where they can play with a virtual version of the real-world toy.