Photo: Mauro Monti/Flickr CC

You might think that each time you inhabit your World of Warcraft character, or Second Life avatar, you are escaping reality and being creative.

Truth is, you are doing neither.

By looking at an avatar’s physical characteristics, researchers now say, marketers “can form accurate personality impressions about targets.”

(“Targets,” in case you were wondering, are those individuals being targeted to receive advertising messages.)

From an announcement:

The findings support the premise that real-life companies that intend to expand to virtual worlds can use member avatars as a proxy for member personality and lifestyles. As a future research direction, avatars and other consumer-generated media could be used as the basis for targeting and segmentation of online consumers.

via Avatars as information: Perception of consumers based on their avatars in virtual worlds. Jean-François Bélisle. 2010; Psychology and Marketing – Wiley InterScience.

Your avatar might be a candidate for a psychotropic drug designed to treat Wanderlust Deficit Disorder — in other words, Internet addiction.

The drug, Virta-Flaneurazine (virtaflaneurazine.wordpress.com) is actually a bit of downloadable code that causes Second Life avatars to rapidly and uncontrollably teleport from one Second Life location to the next and to walk and fly in circles.

The idea is to get people thinking about how much time they spend stuck in the same old places, in-world and out.

via Stuck in your online routines? Give this a shot – The Boston Globe.

Like in “Star Trek’’ and other great sci-fi series, the storylines in “Battlestar Galactica’’ are allegories for the headline issues of our day. Its characters grapple mightily with conflicting personal loyalties, religious fanaticism, and terrorism.

But I am beginning to suspect that MMO players are a different breed altogether from fans of the best-written shows in science fiction, and that the former require very little in the way of story to become engaged in a game.

via MMOs: For fans of Adama and browser-based games, this fall it’s Galactica – The Boston Globe.

Photo: aaron.bihari/Flickr CC

Maybe even better.

Stoned drivers are as good at avoiding obstacles as their straight counterparts, a simulator study finds.

The reason, according to researchers from Hartford Hospital and the University of Iowa, is probably that potheads are slowpokes: they typically slow-down when they are high.

I am reminded by the results, published in the March Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, of a college buddy of mine who insisted that pot made him a better driver. It definitely made him less aggressive on the road.

But even NORML is encouraging drivers to keep their keys in their pockets until their buzzes wear off.

Past use of cannabis, as defined by the detection of inactive cannabis metabolites in the urine of drivers, is not associated with an increased accident risk.

via Cannabis and Driving: A Scientific and Rational Review – NORML.

“I expect that ViewSonic’s PJD5352 projector (about $749) (www.viewsonic.com/products) and its PGD-150 Active Stereographic 3-D shutter glasses ($99) will be a hit not only with engineers and industrial designers, but with new-media professionals and artists, for whom expensive, high-maintenance, 3-DVR “caves,’’ with their Linux servers and projectors and IR tracking hardware, might be impractical.”

via Processing power, OLED touch screen shine on Incredible – The Boston Globe.

Now in Second Life. Photo: US National Guard

The US Air Force, which already owns 12 regions in the virtual world, Second Life, now plans to give each new recruit a duplicate copy of himself to manage for the rest of his career.

The Airman in the first run of a proposed, permanent shift by the US military into virtual reality, will be assigned to a base that matches the one he has outside of Linden Lab’s servers, almost exactly.

The Airman’s avatar, meanwhile, will have a face that crinkles with age. His avatar will also rack up kills, and receive medals, in parallel with his real world rewards.

From a story about the proposal:

“This would take place in simulated worlds that mirror the service’s actual facilities. ‘Everyone who comes into the Air Force will be given an avatar, and that avatar travels with them, grows with them, changes appearance with them,’ said Larry Clemons, of the Air Education and Training Command. ‘It will provide them a history of where they’ve been and a notion of where they’re going.’”

The experiment also reiterates the US military’s commitment to mastering virtual reality — after most people are unable to distinguish between their first and second lives.

That’s what will happen in the Singularity, a forthcoming period of advanced technological development, in which genetics, nanotechnology and robotics converge, and humans achieve immortality.

The Singularity has been explored and described by Ray Kurzweil and others in the transhuman movement.

And only two years ago, the US Army attempted to define what it might mean to be a leader in the Singularity.

via Airmen to Live Out Their Careers In Cyberspace.

Photo: Zoe/Flickr CC

Mad scientist proposed creating self-assembling nanobots and “smart dust” with DNA.

This week’s anti-government, lone gunman, John Patrick Bedell, is another perfect poster boy for the government’s crackdown on the pro-pot and 9/11 truth movements.

Bedell, who was killed at a subway entrance to the Pentagon, was bent on according to the LA Times,

“revealing the truth behind the 9/11 “demolitions.”

Bedell also bore a grudge against the authorities, who busted him with weed at his California home some time ago.

But the mad scientist’s greatest passion may have been bringing about the Singularity — that future point in human evolution, predicted by Ray Kurzweil and others, when genetics, nanotechnology and robotics become a single science, reality and virtual reality become indistinguishable, and people become immortal.

Bedell, in 2006, proposed blending DNA with standard, integrated circuits, to create self-propagating “smart dust,” tiny, self-propagating — indeed, living — sensors and robots that could provide governments will blanket surveillance capabilities.

And in this way, Bedell shares something with another gun-wielding nerd in the news: UAH shooter, Amy Bishop, designer of a cyborg mechanism, the Neuristor.

Here’s Bedell’s proposal for the DNA-integrated circuit hybrids:

via Pentagon shooter apparently doubted 9/11 facts in Web posting – latimes.com.

Click here for a primer on synthetic biology.

Interested in tech from the Hub? Check out this week’s User Friendly

Nothing to see, here. Photo: Akasuki Redstar/Flickr CC

At least that’s the Linden Lab line.

Linden CEO, Mark Kingdon, says you shouldn”t trust your lying eyes, when it appears that the highest number of users are hanging around the naughtiest places

He blames the grid’s layout:

When asked to explain why the adult areas appeared to be much busier than the rest of the map, Kingdon said it was down to the unusual geography of the Second Life map. “Second Life is a fascinating construct. There are mainland areas like [the adult continent] Zindra, where there’s large contiguous land masses and that isn’t actually the majority of land in Second Life.

via PC Pro

From my column, today:

Star Trek Online is far easier to learn than Eve, however. And I like that it encourages avatar-to-avatar interactions off the battlefield, much like World of Warcraft (www.worldofwarcraft.com), which STO more closely resembles, with its use of inventories and its style of play.

(I can see STO becoming a fun place to hold scholarly meetings, as is WoW.)

via Star Trek offering is mission ready – The Boston Globe.