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"WonderBuilders, Inc. has created a virtual world called “Singapore Games Village.” Announced as part of the Media Development Authority of Singapore's new Games Solution Center (GSC), this virtual world allows locally developed games to be showcased to prospective publishers who can then select the titles which they wish to license. The Games Village includes customizable game kiosks. Each kiosk displays games that can be played in a browser or on a mobile platform. The game kiosks are multi-user. As one person plays a game in-world, other remote participants can watch the game play and talk about the action. Users can also take turns playing the game."
"There’s a fantastic snippet in this video, about 2 minutes and 58 seconds in, that does a great job of capturing the spirit of this project. This is a group of senior citizens looking at the virtual world of Second Life projected on a wall in front of them, and you can hear the almost visceral reaction the group has to watching their suggested design changes to a new senior living community take shape before their eyes. A single window was turned into a glass wall, which suddenly lets in more light, and opened up more views to the outside. The impact of this design change was immediately evident to everyone in this session, which was held simultaneously in a conference room in Madison, Wisconsin as well as a platform in the sky above Architecture Island in Second Life."
"The recently-released OpenAvatar kit for open source avatars could help enterprise users of virtual worlds reduce vendor lock-in and, eventually, lead to significant improvements in the appearance of avatars, VastPark CEO Bruce Joy told Hypergrid Business. VastPark is an Australian immersive environment vendor that has both commercial and open source versions of its virtual environment software. The OpenAvatar kit is designed to add a level of abstraction between the virtual environment server and the avatar itself, and can be adopted by any virtual environment that uses mesh avatars."
"OpenSim Mobile is a project that seeks to provide access to virtual worlds (OpenSim based) from mid/low-range mobile devices. Created under J2ME using LWUIT library, we provide a unique user experience for these devices."
"Here you will find the World Wind SDK for Java. With this SDK, developers can embed World Wind technology in their own applications. The API documentation will be made available later."
"An emerging virtual world platform is the destination of droves of emigrant avatars, as a price hike and the shutdown of the teen-only grid have prompted an educator exodus away from Second Life."
"Prim Perfect is a magazine for virtual worlds' homes and gardens, published every six weeks - with a focus usually on the Second Life grid. There are always lots of super articles about buying or renting your home in the Second Life world, finding the best designers, choosing your furniture, arranging it to best advantage, managing your prim count, landscaping your garden and learning the latest news from the world of virtual interior design. Additionally, there are articles about landscapes, designers and events in a variety of virtual worlds."
"The odds of success are against Second Life. In the technology industry, companies almost never get second chances. The best thing a technology company can hope for is to start up, grow, spend a few years dominating the industry, then painfully decline until it's finally purchased by another company that's on the upswing of that cycle."
"Teachers are looking for alternatives as Linden Lab prepares to close down the Teen Grid--a region of the immersive virtual world Second Life designed just for teenagers and their education institutions. Where will all those teen avatars wind up? And is there an upside for those who've spent years developing educational resources on the proprietary platform?"
"As we previously predicted, the Second Life 2.0 viewer is going live today, meeting the originally slated release target of Q1 2010, if only by a few hours. The 2.0 viewer has been in public beta since 23 February."
"One of the common problems I hear about OpenSim is that if you create a private grid, you’ll have to create all your content from scratch. That was the case a couple of years ago, when OpenSim was still new, but for most users, this is no longer the case."
"Avatar Reality, developer of the virtual world platform Blue Mars, announced it's raised $4.2 million from venture capitalists including Henk Rogers and Kolohala Ventures. The startup says it has raised more than $13 million to date."
"This last week I read the Harvard Business School case study entitled: Linden Lab: Crossing the Chasm Rev. August 3, 2009. If you'd like to follow along, the pdf will cost you $6.95 USD and if you have anything more than a passing fancy about the virtual world of Second Life and/or start ups in this space it's almost worth it."
"St. Paul, Minnesota, March 10, 2010 - Today Ken Miller, the CEO of Virtual Learning Labs, announced the formation of the Open Wonderland Foundation and the creation of the Open Wonderland virtual world platform. The Open Wonderland platform is a “fork” of the Project Wonderland toolkit originally developed by Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Miller, who will serve as the Foundation’s first President and Chairman of the Board, explains that the non-profit Open Wonderland Foundation will provide direction and governance for Open Wonderland (http://OpenWonderland.org), a free and open source platform for creating 3D virtual worlds for education, business, and government applications."
"Enterprises rolling out new OpenSim grids are often concerned about security issues of running OpenSim, and justifiably so. OpenSim is alpha software and still poses some security challenges. However, the security level of a particular OpenSim deployment depends quite a bit on how it is configured."
"Below are the candidates for the Federal Virtual World Challenge.
You are welcome to read about and review each entry."
"Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life's economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts."
"At the CeBIT conference in Hanover this week, Kingdon told IT PRO that more business functions would move to worlds like Second Life, for meetings, simulations and more - especially after the launch of more user-friendly systems, like the beta of its new viewer, which allows document sharing."
"Hoping to offer its tools to a new userbase, engine developer BigWorld is launching three new licenses geared for indie, student and small commercial MMO developers.
BigWorld Technology suite intends to offer a "complete technical architecture" for online game and virtual world developers, and includes BigWorld Server Software, Content Creation Pipeline, 3D Client Engine Package, and Live Management Tools & Instrumentation."
"There's departure from the scene will mean that the environment for immersive 3D social virtual worlds, already increasingly barren, will now be even more so. But perhaps because it chose a different financial model, privately-held Second Life publisher Linden Lab has managed to stay ahead of the recession and is said to be profitable."
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