Increasing number of VR Environments

well, I have been quite remiss in not maintaining my blog recently. So much so, that the number of VR environments have exploded in recent months.

Look at this from Tech Crunch:

Virtual Worlds Are So Hot Right Now: $345 Million Invested So Far This Year
I feel like today is Virtual World Day. We started off the morning covering the public beta launch of Vivaty, then Second Life and IBM announced that they bridged two virtual worlds, and Google launched its own version of virtual worlds with Lively.

If it seems like everybody is starting their own virtual world, it is because they are. A report put out today by Virtual Worlds Management tracks $161 million put into 14 virtual-world investments during the second quarter of 2008. In the first quarter there was even more activity, with $184 million put into 23 virtual worlds and supporting technology companies. That brings the total this year alone to $345 million across 37 deals. Some notable deals (you can see the full lists by clicking on the last two links above):

Second Quarter 2008

Grockit——————-MMO Learning Game——-$8 million——-Integral Capital and Benchmark

Nurien Software——–3D social networking——-$15 million——-Northern Light, Globespan, NEA

PrimeSense————-Gestural Interface———-$20.4 million—–Led by Canaan Partners

Realtime Worlds———-MMOG Developer———$50 million——–Maverick Capital, NEA

Stanford Parallel —-Parallel Processing————–$6 million——-Sun Microsystems, AMD, Nvidia, IBM,
Processing Lab for Virtual Worlds HP, and Intel

Turbine———————-MMOG——————-$40 million————–Time Warner and GGV Capital

First Quarter 2008

9You———–Virtual World/Casual Games——$100 million——–Temasek Holdings

Dizzywood —————Youth World————— $1 million——-Shelby Bonnie, Charles River Ventures

EveryScape————— Mirror World————–$7 million——–Dace, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Fix8 ———————- Avatar Content————$2 million ——–SK Telecom

Gizmoz ——————- Avatar Creation ———- $6.5 million——-DoCoMo Capital, ngi group

iOpener ——————–Mixed Reality ————-$6 million———Triangle Venture Capital

Sparkplay Media——Casual MMO with Games—–$4.25 million—–Redpoint, Prism Ventureworks

Unisfair ——————–Virtual Events Platform—–$10 million——-Norwest, Sequoia Capital

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

VR Job - TCD - Ireland

the Aerospace Psychology Research Group, School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, is part of a large EU Research Consortium, and they are currently looking for a researcher to work on an EU project.

The main work of the group concerns carrying out research into the human and organisational factors which underlie safety, reliability and change in complex safety-critical industries like aviation and the process industries.
The work will include VR and HCI/Human Factors.

The position is available immediately and will require one month in Milan.
The salary ranges between 30K-35K Euro (negotiable).

If you would like to know more about this position, please contact:

Alison Kay on 00353 (0) 87 2635673
or:

kayam AT tcd.ie

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch, known to many for his work in promoting the positive side of games and interactive systems, gave his farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon (September 18, 2007). This is indeed a sad occasion, as Randy is only 46 and is suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer.

The lecture follows the tradition of (hypothetical) farewell lectures by distinguished speakers at Carnegie Mellon. The main difference this time is that this is very much a 'real' farewell lecture from Randy.

Randy is a distinguished published speaker on many of the positive aspects of interactive systems and games - in particular the educational benefits.

A video of the lecture is available for viewing.


Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

rgds Dave

Gibson turns lukewarm on the future

In an interview carried by Silicon, William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) seems to be lukewarm on the 'future'. He believes that since WWII technological development has been growing at an exponential rate and that he can't see where the future is heading in this crazy maelstrom of change.

Read the interview at:

http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39168006,00.htm


Dave

CAVEman: The World’s First 4D Virtual Human

ok, it has been a while since I visited my own blog! The shame of it ;)

Well, I came across this piece about CAVEman and this spurred me on to blog about it.
Basically, the guys at the University of Calgary spent a few years (six to be precise) to build an anatomically correct model of the human male and are using their CAVE to enable researchers to explore their implementation of the human model.

This high resolution model can be sized to any scale, and display the entire model or select regions of it.

read more about it here:
CAVEman

New University module to be delivered in Second Life

JOYSTIQ is carrying a piece on an academic (Ed Lamoureux) who is going to run a Multimedia-VR module entirely in Second Life. The module is called "Field Research in Second Life" (Multimedia 490, MM 490) and will initially be limited to 8 students. The module objectives are:

1. teach real world field research (communication ethnography) techniques.
2. adapt real world field research techniques to a virtual environment.
3. examine the potential of immersive online communities as teaching and learning environments, both for BU/MM and for New Media Consortium and its partners/sponsors.
4. expose BU/MM students (as future MM producers) to an immersive, online, 3D environment that has purposes in addition to/other than gaming.

This is truly a new departure and Ed should be commended for taking this `leap'.

It would be nice if Ed were to publish a post-module evaluation so that we can see if this is a viable medium for teaching and learning.

Dave

Media Machines announces Ajax3D based on Ajax and X3D

[NEWS] Media Machines announces Ajax3D based on Ajax and X3D

August 01, 2006
Media Machines announced Ajax3D, a Javascript-based software library and development paradigm for deploying online virtual worlds and 3D web applications based on Ajax and X3D. The company also issued an open call for participation in an industry forum at www.ajax3D.org, dedicated to the research and development of online virtual worlds using 3D open standards and Ajax best practices.

Ajax3D combines the visual richness and interactivity of X3D, the ISO standard for networked 3D graphics, with the ease of use and ubiquity of Ajax, a set of Javascript and XML programming methods for developing web applications. Ajax3D employs the X3D Scene Access Interface (SAI) for controlling 3D worlds within a web browser via Javascript. Ajax3D content can be viewed with any web browser with an X3D-compliant plug-in.

VR
Ajax3D
X3D