Virtual Worlds Forum

Marketing using virtual worlds and serious games is well established, but still in its difficult infancy in terms of brands figuring out what works and what doesn't - hence the various high-profile examples of times when it hasn't, particularly within Second Life. However, to say 'virtual worlds don't work for brands', as some media reports have, isn't telling the whole story. With that in mind, One to One Interactive's T=zero research division has released an interesting new report, entitled 'Serious Games for Marketing: Learnings from Corporate and Amateur Efforts in Second Life'.

There's an ongoing debate about how best to monetise virtual worlds, but one thing's not in doubt: the flow of investment into the virtual worlds space from two sources: venture capitalists (for commercial virtual worlds), and research grants (for medical / educational applications). The Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology in New Zealand is the latest beneficiary of the latter, receiving $500,000 for a new project exploring educational uses for Second Life.

Analyst firm Gartner is releasing a new report investigating how enterprises can justify investing in virtual world projects - called logically enough 'How to Justify Enterprise Investment in Virtual Worlds'. It offers a three-step approach to ensure businesses get their money's worth out of virtual worlds (the premise that they should be investing appears to be taken as a given).

A BBC-sponsored study by the University of Westminster has thrown up some encouraging evidence that virtual worlds can be a positive experience for children, helping them to develop social skills and experiment with their identity. The research was based on feedback from early users of the BBC's Adventure Rock virtual world, and was carried out by Professor David Gauntlett and Lizzie Jackson.

The University of Worcester's Colin Price has come up with a new form of presentations that (I hope) someone uses at this year's Virtual Worlds Forum! It involves embedding PowerPoint presentations into first-person-shooter game Unreal Tournament.

Here's something to chew on if you've got an interest in virtual crime. Dutch researcher Bart Schermer has published a paper called 'Alan Turing and the Matrix: Intelligent Systems for Law Enforcement in Virtual Worlds'. It paints a picture of virtual law enforcement agents operating within virtual worlds in the future.

The headlines may have been in consumer usage of virtual worlds in the last couple of years, but there's an emerging sense that there could be genuine value in corporate use of virtual worlds. Now, the Association of Virtual Worlds has published its first Business Guide to Virtual Worlds, which claims to list more than 30 solutions, vendors and providers helping businesses go virtual.

Interesting news on a course in Second Life at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. It included a module titled 'Unreal Central Perspective' examining the representation of architecture within Linden Lab's virtual world, and how it's influenced by gaming, and the fact that it's unrestricted by gravity and materials.

More new technology for navigating virtual worlds now, albeit not something you'd be able to install in your living room. It's called CyberCarpet, and it's an omni-directional treadmill that's being used to allow people to walk naturally around virtual cities, with the initial application involving virtual Pompeii and Rome.

There've been a few announcements in recent months about voice chat being added to virtual worlds and MMOs, but how much do users/players actually want it? Some research from Greg Wadley at the University of Melbourne sheds some light on the issue.

The Alice Project is an intriguing academic project at Carnegie Mellon University, which aims to teach teenage girls to program within a 3D environment. It's the brainchild of professor Randy Pausch, and offers an accessible route into learning Java and C++.

Scared of spiders? Virtual reality could be the answer. And not just because you can kill lots of spiders in World of Warcraft with a great big sword. A psychology professor at the University of New Brunswick in Canada thinks virtual worlds can be used in the treatment of certain phobias.

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have unveiled their latest project. He's called Eddie, and he's a character within Second Life who's claimed to have the reasoning abilities of a four-year-old child. It's part of the Institute's research into more realistic virtual characters, who can have their own beliefs and reason about the beliefs of the human-controlled avatars that they meet.

New research from Nottingham Trent University claims that 68% of women who play online games choose male characters, while more than half of men adopt a female avatar. The findings come from a study of more than 100 players of MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy.