| Posts in category 'Virtual world' |
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28 April 2008
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26 April 2008
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23 April 2008
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A two-day conference this week will bring together scholars, developers and participants in virtual worlds to discuss the emerging cultures being created from a range of online communities.
Event organizers theorize that virtual worlds can be studied by researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito, Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell, UCI informatics professors Paul Dourish and Bonnie Nardi, Intel researcher Maria Bezaitis and UCI anthropologist Tom Boellstorff will lead the discussions. The event is sponsored by Intel Research and UCI’s Department of Anthropology and Center for Ethnography. Tom Boellstorff, one of the conference organizers, is the author of Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. His is the first book to take a look at Second Life from a purely anthropological perspective. |
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10 April 2008
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Last year’s conference “Innovation Forum Interaction Design” focused on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science.
Speakers included Gillian Crampton Smith, Anthony Dunne, Tim Edler, Frank Jacob, Gesche Joost, Bernard Kerr, Patrick Kochlik, Kristjan Kristjansson, Bill Moggridge, Dennis Paul, Mike Richter and Bruce Sterling. (via Bruce Sterling) |
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1 April 2008
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2 February 2008
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Darren Sharp of the Smart Internet (Australia) contacted me about the new research ‘User-led Innovation: A New Framework for Co-creating Business and Social Value,’ that he co-authored with Mandy Salomon.
Download study (pdf, 2.4 mb, 57 pages) |
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17 December 2007
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Bruno Giussani posted his running notes of Jeffrey Huang’s inaugural lesson at EPFL, the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
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14 December 2007
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By 2010, says Gartner, 20% of global Tier 1 retailers will have some kind of marketing presence in online games and virtual worlds. Gartner predicts that by 2010 20% of Tier I retailers will have a marketing presence in virtual worlds. It also predicts that through 2012 the number of consumers using mobile phones to shop will increase at an average of 25% per year. Put together the two could make for an interesting combination, but Gartner doesn’t make any recommendations for mobile worlds. It does recommend that retailers begin to include virtual worlds as customer touchpoints, begin to test and measure virtual world initiatives before moving in, keep an eye on the space with a focus on the young demographic, and pick the right environment for the right demographic. (via Eliane Alhadeff, FutureLab, and Business & Games) |
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12 December 2007
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Nicolas Nova, user experience and foresight researcher working at the Media and Design Lab (EPFL) and at the near future laboratory, is currently in Brussels where he gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a brand new center for digital cultures and technology.
The presentation entitled “Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art” was about the fading boundaries between interaction design, new media art and academic research. The hybridisation of digital and physical environments (through locative media, urban displays, augmented reality or mobile games) is explored by a large variety of people and institutions, not only engineers and academic researchers but also artists and designers. The talk looked at why the projects from the new media art/interaction design/device art are relevant and what they tell about the design of future technological artifacts. iMal is the first Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels, a new place of about 600 square metres for the meeting of artistic, scientific and industrial innovations. The 2007/2008 programme of iMAL, an initiative of the French speaking community of Belgium, will propose basic and advanced workshops (i.e. on locative media, RFID, Ubicomp and the Internet of Things, urban electronic acts thanks to the support of VAF), regular concerts & performances, a series of conferences on Arts/Sciences, a series of meetings between innovating companies and creative peoople, and the first Dorkbot Brussels meetings. Download presentation (pdf, 20 mb, 38 slides) |
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12 December 2007
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12 December 2007
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The appeal of online virtual worlds such as Second Life is such that it may trigger an exodus of people seeking to “disappear from reality,” said Edward Castronova, Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, an expert on large-scale online games.
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7 December 2007
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1 December 2007
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31 October 2007
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27 October 2007
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The Dott07 festival, curated by John Thackara, and taking place in the English city of NewcastleGateshead, is now in its last few days. One of the events was a series of debates on a variety of topics, such as energy, food, health, movement, and schools.
The debate on movement started from the assumption that the movement of people and goods around the world consume vast amounts of matter, energy, space, and time - most of it non-renewable. Question that arise are: Should sustainable development therefore be concentrated in cities, where economic progress can most feasibly be de-coupled from transport intensity? Or are there ways to ensure that rural communities have access to services by using transport resources more smartly? And could new forms of sustainable tourism be enabled by access to territorial and cultural assets that already exist? The session began with a keynote from Anthony Townsend, research director at the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto, California, who has now posted his entire presentation online.
Townsend believes in the future of virtual worlds, telerobotics, and high-definition videoconferencing. But does presence really always require such high-end technologies? Townsend’s talk was followed by a review of Dott 07’s Move Me project, which explored the potential to transform transportation resource efficiency in one village, Scremerston, in Northumberland, and by a review of three Dott 07 projects - Sustainable Tourism, Welcomes and Mapping the Necklace. |
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21 October 2007
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The Serious Games Institute in Coventry, England, says that it is one of the first places dedicated to helping businesses enhance their own operations by harnessing virtual worlds for things like training, communication and emergency planning.
Read full story (International Herald Tribune) |
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18 October 2007
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The latest issue of Pictures of the Future, the half-yearly research and innovation magazine of Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, looks at the future, with Epcot style utopian thinking and illustrations straight from the Jetsons (check page 40).
Two topics stand out: “Factories of the Future” and “Seamless Communication”. Factories of the Future is about making it possible to design products in the virtual world and to design and test their associated production processes there as well. If you are interested in spimes or the mechatronic challenge, this pretty enthusiastic engineering prose is reading material for you. But don’t expect a critical discourse about how this all matters to people.
Seamless Communication makes much of the Siemens collaboration with Nokia. Jarkko Sairanen, responsible for Nokia’s business strategy and technology planning, talks about the usability challenge (page 82-83). But there is also an article about the smart home which adapts to user profiles (page 86-87); and an insight piece on how to prevent production plants from being hacked (page 94-95) - I am not making this up. Download report (pdf, 3.7 mb, 55 double pages) |
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9 October 2007
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8 October 2007
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Susan Kish, vice president of the network and community practice at XING, has posted a long essay on how enterprises should look at Second Life and, more generally, at virtual worlds.
Susan Kish has been working with networks and communities for over 10 years. This essay, completed with a glossary and a bibliography, is available in pdf for downloading here (1.4 MB). (via Lunch over IP) |
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8 October 2007
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The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about how virtual worlds are becoming more and more popular, and provides an extensive update on how the playing field is changing.
The article features Gaia, Habbo, IMVU, Kaneva, Metaplace, MTV, Second Life, There, vSide, and Zwinky. |
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