Category Archives: Virtual reality

SL + 3D – hardware = total inworld immersion (TIA)

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Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor and developer Philippe Bossut today demonstrated a camera-based motion recog system that controls your avatar’s movements in Second Life. Looks good on the video, below…

With a 3D viewing headset (such as the augmented reality headset imagined here), you would have your own at-home 3DVR “cave” for exploring the metaverse.

Incredibly, we are just years, perhaps only months, away from very discreet (i.e., they won’t take over your livingroom), immersive experiences, at home.

And it will cost a fraction of what 3DVR caves, such as the one at Brown University (an elaborate mix of multiple projectors, hand and head tracking devices, and a stack of Linux servers).

Of course, the more seamless metaversal interfaces become, the more likely people will start forgetting where they really are.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t52gkAwJq8&eurl=http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/04/11/mitch-kapor-unveils-sl-navigation-via-3d-camera/]

[digg=http://digg.com/hardware/SL_3D_hardware_near_complete_immersion]

Second Life bubble bursts

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Virtual land values plummet more than 40 percent, to $1,000 even.

(Would you buy land from this leprechaun? Image: Markbaard Meredith)

In Second Life, there’s a sucker born every minute (give or take). Some virtual land barons, for example, are finding out that what they’ve got ain’t worth much–since the supply of their product took another step toward “unlimited.”

To-date, some landowners have gotten rich selling parcels at similarly inflated prices.

But hoping to reboot waning interest in its virtual world, Linden Lab this month will make more islands available, at a fraction of what users have been paying lately for the make believe property.

Of course, land is limitless when it exists only on a server somewhere. And there are going to be more than one virtual world to visit and park it in the near future. But you knew that already.

Reuters/Second Life » Linden to increase land supply, drop prices
Linden Lab announced on its blog yesterday it would be increasing the land supply in Second Life for the second quarter of 2008.

Linden has seen average prices for land drift from about L$6.3 per meter in Q1 to around L$11.5 per meter currently. Strong demand for virtual land — essentially dedicated CPU time on Linden Lab’s servers — is a bright spot for Second Life’s in-world economy amidst flagging overall growth.

Docs to fight stress in Second Life

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I learned this while researching this Boston Globe piece (link, excerpt, below): Dr. Joe Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health in Boston, says cognitive-behavioral therapy is “the next logical step” for clinical testing in-world. (In-world is where Second Lifers say they are, when they are logged-in.) Kvedar, below, addresses a conference, in-world.panel-shot-3.jpg
MD to fight stress in Second Life – The Boston Globe
In another sign that Second Life is beginning to resemble the first, doctors are stepping into the virtual world to reach patients they might otherwise miss.

A Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist, Dr. Daniel Hoch, wants to learn whether therapy administered in Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Lab, can have benefits in the world that we share with our spouses, kids, death, and taxes.

In coming months, an instructor from Mass. General will lead 20 to 40 Second Life recruits through guided meditations designed to reduce their stress levels.

Note: They are teaching their subjects the Relaxation Response, which I believe is based on Transcendental Meditation. — mb