October 2008
1 post
I stopped posting here in August...
You’ll find my postings on Wordpress, Blogger (German blog) and Friendfeed now. Thanks to Hao Chen I was able to import all my Tumblr posts into Wordpress. He actually wrote a tumblr-to-wordpress script especially for me - how awesome is that?! He’s also coded a lot of useful other scripts for Friendfeed and GoogleReader, look at his page on Userscipts.org
Thanks, Hao :)
P.S. The...
August 2008
20 posts
Forrester Research: 3D-Internet ist in fünf Jahren... →
3D-Internet: In fünf Jahren Alltag - pressetext.schweiz Eher ein alter Hut und leider kein Verweis auf die Studie, auf die sich die Pressetext Meldung bezieht. Deshalb hier der direkte Link zu den…
Training und Kollaboration in 3D-Welten →
managerSeminare hat heute einen Artikel veröffentlicht über die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten für Unternehmen, virtuelle Welten für Themen wie Weiterbildung, Teambuilding und internationale…
Crowdsourcing: Products from the "people formerly...
Interesting (while promotional) video about the impact of Crowdsourcing on product development and change of whole markets. The author of the book he’s promoting with this trailer likes two definitions for crowdsourcing best:
The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an...
Study shows: Social Media's strategic role...
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently conducted one of the first statistically significant, longitudinal studies on the usage of social media in corporations. The new study compares corporate adoption of social media between 2007 and 2008 by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. Magazine.
Review...
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Kzero: Mapping the “Virtual Worlds” with Google... →
Interesting experiment by Kzero: they entered the term “Virtual Worlds” in Google new geographical trend tool and posted the resulting maps from 2005 through 2008. I think Asia might be under-represented in Google insight because Google rates only 3rd or 4th search engine in Korea … and according to an expert in the Asian digital media industry it is seen as highly deficient on...
“Teens and tweens are making more and more of the purchase decisions, or at least...”
– Virtual Worlds News: Q&A: Sears CMO Richard Gerstein on Marketing Across the Metaverse
SLim: Thin Client for Second Life; Avatars Also to... →
SLim will be an IM client with voice (like Skype) for computers that are prevented from accessing Second Life, either by old hardware or IT departments and firewalls. This could help the Second Life Grid better suited for organizations and collaboration because people could oparticipate in inworld meetings using just a lightweight Instant Messaging client or even by phoning in with a normal...
PsyBlog: 7 Myths of Crowd Psychology →
Robot teacher divides experts over teaching of... →
Facebook Is Not Only The World’s Largest Social... →
Kinder ab 4 Jahre spielen mit dem eigenen Bolly... →
Eeriely Realistically Rendered 3D World. Watch... →
Watch more than the first 30 seconds, because you’ll think this is clearly a fake until you realize that those camera movements are simply not possible in real life. Later on they show avatars, lightning and embedding of all ther media like pics and movies etc. just with a click on the wall. Dusan Writer asks: What IS this?? UPDATE: Techcrunch: “little is known about LivePlace, other...
Gartner Locates Virtual Worlds in Trough of... →
Teaching language to robots - let them learn like... →
Plymouth University researchers will build two robots using hardware and software allowing them to interact with humans and each other to exchange learned information like humans. They are equipped with cameras, speakers, microphones and tracking devices in order to learn about nonverbal communication (gestures, pointing) and the meaning of words just like childrens would. The goal of the project...
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Your brain is quicker than you think. What's wrong... →
While I am all in favor of the studies showing the value of not overthinking a decision (because your brain knows better), I can’t subscribe to the “humans don’t have a free will” conclusion. The thesis that humans may don’t have a free will seems to engage people continiously to date. I am not a neuroscientist (although I studied Psychology for a time) and this...
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Conformity magic in action: Elevator Psychology...
Conformity (group pressure leads to actions against rational judgement) can do pretty spooky stuff, and if you think that today is any different than the fifties: find an elevator which has two doors, take some friends with you and do your own psychological experiment. — Elevator Psychology and The London Underground (via feedly)
“magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but...”
– How magicians control your mind - The Boston Globe
It’s all about the way our brain perceives things and who knows better than magicians, who fool your perception professionally, how that works? This article is about the beginning collaboration of neuroscientists and magicians (no joke).
Virtual Worlds as the Catalyst for an AI... →
Article (old but still interesting) on KurzweilAI.net: Artificial Intelligence Meets the Metaverse: Teachable AI Agents Living in Virtual Worlds by Ben Goertzel, Oct. 2007. I would like to know what happened to the ESC project of the virtual intelligent pets (and I will ask them)
“90 Per Cent of Corporate Virtual World Projects Fail Within 18 Months”
– Steve Prentice, Gartner Consulting, at Gartner Emerging Trends Symposium/ITxpo May 2008 in Barcelona
Well if you don’t want to be one of them contact me.
Dusan Writer’s Metaverse » Pink User Interface -... →
Pretty avatars in pink…”Think of it as training wheels for girls who will one day grow up to be long-legged blondes in Second Life. (…)”
July 2008
44 posts
Endlich: Eingebaute Lippensynchronisation in... →
Was die Kommunikation in virtuellen 3D-Welten angeht, vor allem in der Zusammenarbeit mit anderen, ist die fehlende gewohnte nonverbale Komunikation immer noch ein großes Manko. In Second Life gab es…
How Intelligent Have Second Life AIs Become? [New... →
The answer is: not very. Hamlet Au describes his conversation with a “robotar”, a computer controlled avatar and chatbot. He was mostly impressed by the nonverbal movements the helper bot made - she turned in his direction, for example - but there are some bot applications/services available today which allow these things (Pikkubot for example). I should tell him about it, but right...
Virtual goods starting to pan out for Facebook... →
…and not just the venture-funded ones » VentureBeat
Typical virtual good: a Facebook app to waste your time (and that of your friends)
Goethe-Institut opens presence in Second Life →
Opening July 28th a private island at this location, including virtual classrooms, exhibitions and a free studio for artists. The Goethe-Institut global network is visualised in the form of a three-dimensional, interactive map of the world.
Schöne Neue Welten: It's Not a Game Console, It's... →
Nintendo Manager Reggie Fils-Aime, (l) President Nintendo America Inc. und VP Cammie Dunaway (r) demonstrierten auf der E3 das Gemeinschaftserlebnis der Wii-Spielkonsole (Bild: Standard.at)…
New World Notes: When Will Microsoft Go Big On... →
The Daedalus Project: Our Virtual Bodies,... →
(via naki)
The survey results suggest that we tend to be just like optimized selves and the real world stereotypes hold in virtual worlds as well: women are socializing, graceful explorers and men are over-achieving sociopaths…ah well :-)
From the survey: “(…) much of avatar choice seems to revolve around mirroring; taller people prefer taller avatars, older people prefer...
Afternoon Reading: How Google Achieves... →
Image via Modern Life is Rubbish. Edge’s recommendation of a really great scifi story by science historian George Dyson, brother of techbiz genius Esther Dyson. Greetings from Douglas Adams, too…. Jump into the story right away: Engineer’s Dreams
“It’s actually about people making things together.”
– Really » Blog Archive » I’m in ur browser, chatting in 3D
Nice blog post about all the buzz (quoting Rosedale, Linden Labs founder) and I couldn’t agree more. It’s about facilitating collaboration in an ever-changing, globalized and internationalized (business) world and about...
“The 3D Internet will change how we live. Real life will never be the same.”
– Wall Street Journal, July 17
Like I predicted a week ago (yeah I know, that’s lame :-)), the serious papers are picking up the discussion and development that was stirred by the launch of Google’s Lively and a couple of other web-based virtual world clients in the new media blogging...
“The next time someone tells you to settle down and pick just one thing for your...”
– What If You Have Many Different Interests and Cannot Commit to Any of Them?
Path 101: What are people with similar... →
Interesting project: your participation will help them develop an effective personality quiz - one that helps people figure out what like-minded people are doing with their careers. Take the personality test and help the Path 101 team build enough data to be useful to many people.
Technology Review: The Virtual World as Web... →
3-D data in Second Life: the tree shown here changes color in response to real-time stock-market data.
The Power of “New”: the appeal of “new” is... →
Why do virtual worlds matter? Do real people...
Do people matter to your company’s products? Are you interested in new clients and reduced costs? If so, why aren’t you preparing your company for shared virtual environments / 3D Web / the Metaverse? Or did you think a private island in Second Life is the answer (it din’t work! Bummer)? Think of the year 1993. How did you do business back then? How did your product manager...
Stunningly realistic humanoid avatars coming to... →
Stunningly realistic looking and moving avatars are coming to Cobalt, an emerging multi-institutional community software development effort to deploy an open source metaverse browser/toolkit application built using the Croquet SDK. Croquet was specifically designed to enable the creation and low-cost deployment of large scale metaverses. It is especially interesting because of its impressive...
Lively not a "go lightly"
My very cartoonish avatar sitting in a kind of bare office (visit it here and move around the furniture if you care) - this is what Google’s new 3D chat environment called Lively looks like. You can’t do much yet except picking stuff out of a catalog and arrange it (adding Hyperlinks or an occasional picture and YouTube video), but there are still a lot of issues to solve during the...
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Why asking for help is easier than you think and...
I just found this interesting bit on the PsyBlog: “Ask for help, but don’t ask for too much”. People notoriously underestimated how likely others were to help them by as much as 100%. The reasons are our difficulty to think like another person (egocentric bias) and the social pressure the other person is put under.
There’s two very practical messages coming out of this...
“Platforms like Lively and Vivaty or technologies like Flash and Unity are all...”
– Sebastian Küpers, The Impact of Lively and the recent Proceedings in OpenSim Interoperability
Nice summary/obituary (?) of Vivaty, the social... →
Just hours after Vivaty’s launch Google came with Lively - another web-embedded 3D world/3D enhanced chat room. Lively has fewer features and cartoon-like characters appealing to teens more then adults, but since it’s Google (think ads, reach and world domination) it could be that Vivaty’s days are already over. Anyway: here are a few interesting facts from the Techcrunch...
Techcrunch: Virtual Worlds Are So Hot Right Now:... →
My prediction: Financial Times and Wall Street Journal will pick up on this, then German top managers and journalists will read it and after that we’ll see another wave of unreflected, but this time anyway welcome news coverage of what is going on in the web world (German news magazines declared the 3D web dead because they thought it’s just Second Life and they didn’t get it....
“The Web will just become more 3D over time”
– TechCrunch. Well that’s what I have been saying all along and I am glad we reached the next stage now. Can’t wait for the phase when we’re just getting down to business (like, uh, using it) instead of speculating all day about such a natural development
Of course 3D will stick - like pictures, video and...
Robert Scoble asked this morning if now, that more and more virtual worlds run in regular web browsers more people would not only try them out but actually stick to using them. He refers to a demo of Vivaty, another 3D shared space running in a normal web browser (to be precise, only in Internet Explorer and only on PC, like most of them do. He’s as appaled about that fact as I am). There...
Are you a Virtual World Whore? Virtual Addiction,... →
Thoughtful article about behavioural addiction and the common mistaking the medium (Internet) for the message (addictive behaviour). “Do you crave the fun, excitement, and pleasure of virtual worlds to the detriment of the rest of your life? (…) It’s a compulsive behavior, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Everquest, Second Life, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Internet porn or...