Next up, Nicholas Nagle from the Immersive Education Initiative with Transcoder Project. Nagle's pitch was to establish standards and build code that will allow the independent deployment of content in immersive education platforms. ...

Gilbert co-chairs Immersive Education's Psychology of Immersive Environments Technology Working Group. He's looking for people to join their collaboration, if you're willing to participate in their basic and applied research. ...

I'm still chewing on all that I heard, saw, and experienced at the Immersive Education Summit (#iED) this weekend at Boston College. While my earlier blog posts on the conference were written while I was there, reflecting during the ...

Wonderful first day (out of three) of the Immersive Education Institute, 2010 Boston Summit at Boston College. I attempted to tweet the conference – so you may also want to find those (twitter ID: rheyden). ...

Unfortunately, writer-director Prior's revamped exploration down the rabbit hole doesn't quite reach the dizzying heights some of us were hoping for, but it's still a fun ride.

Immersive Education 2010 Summit Attendees to Receive $2500 in Permanent Virtual World Land - CGW explores how leading-edge graphics techniques, including the 3D modeling, animation and visualization are used in such applications as ...

(Image courtesy Project Wonderland.) Miller says he is pleased that Aaron Walsh, Grid Institute Director and head of the Immersive Education Initiative (http://ImmersiveEducation.org), has assured him that Wonderland will continue to be an ... Board member Warren Sheaffer, Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Saint Paul College — recently voted the top 2-year college in the country in student degree program satisfaction, manages the Virtual Northstar project. ...

At the end of January, Project Wonderland development lead Nicole Yankelovich broke the news that Oracle would no longer be applying development resources to the Project Wonderland enterprise immersive software platform. ...

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open ...

Oracle is pulling out development resources from Project Wonderland, the open-source virtual world platform originally supported by Sun Microsystems. Oracle's acquisition of Sun for $7.4 billion came into effect last Wednesday; ...

The cable television network C-SPAN is going to partner with the location-based social network Foursquare to try and help educate users about the American political process. C-SPAN will have its own Foursquare account that will act a central hub for all of the C-SPAN branded content. The core of the partnership will be Tips, bits of information that users can "attach" to real-life locations through Foursquare. C-SPAN will attach Tips relating to policy and government to relevant locations through Washington, DC. 

Some of these Tips will be very elaborate. A Tip left at the US Capitol will contain a link to a C-SPAN YouTube video that explains how the federal budget process works. In time, C-SPAN hopes to start adding Tips to relevant locations outside of Washington, DC. It seems C-SPAN will do this primarily through its virtual "C-SPAN Digital Bus" that 'travels' the US, checking in from various locations and leaving Tips at relevant places nearby. 

[via Mashable]

Virtual world Wazzamba has given away its 75th prize vacation travel package to its users as it approaches its six month anniversary. Wazzamba emphasizes casual games as part of its virtual world offering, with trips given out to players each week. There are 30 different locations in Wazzamba's virtual world, where players are encouraged to play casual games and accumulate virtual currency. Then users can enter competitions for two-week DreamTrips and five-day GetAway Trips.

Wazzamba launched in January of 2010. It awards one trip package per week to a top-scoring free member and then three trip packages per week to the three top-scoring paying subscription members. Players can log up to 15 game scores for contest purposes each week, with their top five scores qualifying for entry in the week's trip giveaway. Destinations for giveaway trips have included Hawaii, Paris, Australia, Costa Rica, New Orleans, and London. 

Wazzamba's casual games include Classic Trivia, Word Traveler, or the Catwalk Countdown match-3 game. The casual games have a virtual goods element in that users can buy power-ups to help improve their performance, but must purchase them using the virtual currency (or "Wazzamba Adventure Club Miles") they need to use to enter each week's trip giveaways. The only alternative is to buy them using the cash-based virtual currency Wazzamba Dollars. 

Today Amsterdam-based Web directory start-up Kadaza announced that it was launching its personal start page product Kadaza.com in the US. Kadaza.com automatically filters the Web so that it displays only the most popular (and presumably, safe) sites. The page breaks Web sites down into categories like news, career, and social networking. Users can customize individual start pages with a simple drag n' drop visual environment. 

The idea behind Kadaza.com is to make the Web more visual and immersive. Instead of old-fashioned hypertext links and URLS, Kadaza displays site logos broken down into color-coded categories. Sites displayed by Kadaza aren't aggregated automatically, but instead carefully curated by volunteers working for Kadaza. Users can tag personal start pages with images from a collection of over 25,000 logos. The Kadaza start page can also be customized with colors, patterns, and images. 

Kadaza launched in its original Dutch version in 2008, created by a student named Karel Rotteveel who wanted to try and create an improved version of a Web directory. He studied the behavior of users surfing Web sites as part of a university project, then decided that what users really wanted was a concise and visual representation of the Web's most commonly-used sites. Kadaza was successful in the Netherlands and had since been launched in England, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy.

TIE from Emantras wins 2010 Distinguished Achievement Award from Association ...
PRLog.Org (press release)
... has named Emantras' TIE (Totally Immersive Education) as winner of the 2010 Distinguished Achievement Award in the Educational Toys & Games category. ...

and more »

German online game publisher Gameforge announced today that it had closed a licensing deal with CBS Consumer Products to create two browser-based free-to-play games based on the Star Trek license. These games will be casual offerings designed to complement the Cryptic/Atari subscription MMO Star Trek Online. To date, Gameforge has published over 20 games in over 50 different languages that reach over 100 million players worldwide. 

One of Gameforge's Star Trek games will be for Facebook and developed by an unnamed external German studio. Another unnamed external studio in California will handle development of a second browser-based Star Trek game. The games will be published simultaneously in the US and Europe. One will be based on the original Star Trek series while the other will be based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It is not yet confirmed what type of game either title will be or how it will monetize. 

[via Worlds In Motion]

The MagiQuest live-action role-playing game is expanding online with a new virtual world called MagiQuest Online: The Portal Adventure Series. The initial content released for the virtual world will be called Chapter One: The Clan Courtyard And Twisted Woods Realms. The virtual world will share the live version's emphasis on puzzle solving and will be developed in cooperation with Cyan Worlds, developer of the Myst video games. 

MagiQuest Online will tie in directly with the storyline and content of the live MagiQuest role-plays. The story calls for players to take the role of powerful wizards called Magi and protect portals that connect the virtual world of MagiQuest to the real one. If the online players fail, then they're teased with the notion of dragons and monsters invading the real world. The live-action MagiQuest centers will also include storylines about protecting the portals from monsters.

When players start a MagiQuest Online game, they will have the option of logging in with the account they use in the MagiQuest Live games. This will allow players to start in the virtual world with all of the powers, treasure, and experience they've gained at the live-action centers. Players can acquire more powers and items by playing MagiQuest Online, then transfer these winnings to their next live-action adventure at a MagiQuest center.

Players who complete the Chapter One content in the MagiQuest virtual world will gain access to an exclusive quest the next time they visit the MagiQuest live-action centers. Likewise, players can meet friends made during MagiQuest live-action games in the online virtual world, or vice versa. The first chapter of the MagiQuest virtual world will cost $9.99. It can be purchased at MagiQuest live-action role-playing centers and online at MagiQuest.com.

Today MindArk announced that virtual vehicles would become part of its Entropia Universe and Planet Calypso virtual worlds when the 11.2 client patch goes live. The patch is scheduled for today. Ground-based vehicles will be the only type available initially, but MindArk plans to roll out boats, aircraft, and even spaceships in future content updates. Users will be able to design and build their own vehicles.

"With this new system, the whole community now has the opportunity to build vehicles. The features included in today's release are just the beginning of the vehicle system content. The development teams are already working with upcoming features [including] boats. It will soon be possible to cruise the lakes and oceans on the planets of Entropia Universe," said MindArk, in a press statement.

[via Massively]

With our iPad Game Summit taking place this coming Monday, June 28th in San Francisco, we are now finalizing everything.  One of those elements is wrapping up registration.  Online Registration ends this Friday, June 25th. The event provides you with the detailed insight to create not just your iPad strategy, but your entire Apple mobile device - iOS 4 - strategy (iPad, iPhone and iTouch). Join Interpret, Flurry, Trinity Ventures, M2 Research, Hooked Media Group, Zong, IGN, Dictionary.com, Oceanhouse Media, XEODesign, Playfirst, ngmoco, Aurora Feint, Riptide Games, Chitika, Macworld, AdMob, Mobclix, VentureBeat, and more. Full speaker list and conference schedule are available here. Register here by this Friday and save $70 off the onsite price. By the way, Apple's iOS 4 comes out today - in fact it should be available for download anytime now.

Welcome to the Virtual Worlds News Wrap-Up for the week of June 19, 2010. The Wrap-Up is where VWN spotlights stories that we didn't get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the virtual worlds industry.

• Big Brother Watches In This Virtual World: New Zealand paper The Sunday News profiles SmallWorlds executive producer and director Rick Earl. He discusses the things SmallWorlds does in terms of moderation and wordfiltering to keep the site environment appropriate for underage users. His goal is to balance user freedom and user safety.
• EA Playfish Racks Up Stats With First Branded Soccer Game FIFA Superstars: Playfish's new EA-branded social game has picked up 1.7 million users in three weeks. This game is a major test of EA's theory that brands will eventually be able to command strong audiences in social gaming just as they do in console gaming. 
• Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: "FrontierVille Is The Most Successful Launch We've Ever Had": Zynga's first major launch since Treasure Isle is shaping up to be a major success. The game picked up 100,000 users in its first day with over 70% of those users returning in the second day. 

Filed under: Business models, Culture, MMO industry, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds, The Virtual Whirl

Most things in the world operate on faith. Governments, currencies, intellectual property, human rights and brands all require certain minimum levels of belief and confidence in order to function.

When it comes to virtual environments, as I've maintained in the past, faith is critical.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: A crisis of confidence

The Virtual Whirl: A crisis of confidence originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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