For those of us who will not be at the AERA conference in New York City, we can join the Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning (ARVEL) special interest group’s launch party via Second Life: Monday, March 24, 7:00 to 9:00 pm slurl.com/secondlife/EDTECH105/132/24 Or, in person: Hilton New York – Petit Trianon, 3rd Floor [...]

Two interesting pieces of news emerged on virtual worlds: At the Virtual Worlds Conference, IBM and Linden Labs announced plans to develop a set of open standards that would allow avatars to traverse from one virtual environment to another. Multiverse Network is building tools that will allow virtual world developers to access and incorporate elements [...]

From Ars Technica: Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google [...]

Twenty years ago, playing games over a distance might have meant that you played turn-taking games like chess over email, and you were cutting edge. I remember people playing chess through snail mail! You would make your move and wait for a reply. What is happening now is taking place in real-time in virtual environments [...]

We’re back this week with the final five top ten lists! Today’s list contains tools and Web resources to help people start leapfrogging now. Note: It’s hard to create an innovative tools top ten list while omitting services from Google – but, for the purpose of this list, Google is left off because everybody wants [...]

Echoing the spirit of Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson’s EPIC 2014, Casaleggio Associati has produced a short video on the Future of Media, where Google, Amazon and Second Life dominate the media world through business acquisitions, reality replication in virtual spaces, and reality design. Does the Eye of Osiris at the end of the video [...]

The folks at the Technology Evangelist blog did a remarkable job in recording Ray Kurzweil‘s talk at the Killer App Expo and feeding video to the net. Benjamin J. Higginbotham writes: Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition, health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, technological singularity and futurism. At the Killer App [...]