Virtual Worlds is reporting that There.com will shut down their public environment this week. They were funded via the micro-payment model and said the economic downturn hit their customers hard, thus virtual purchases stopped. It will be interesting to see how the other micro-payment funded systems survive reduced consumer demand.
One interesting side note, Forterra’s OLIVE, which was just sold to SAIC, shared code base with There.com.
GestureTek, a Canadian company, has announced technology that enables interaction with images projected from your phone.
via GestureTek to Let You Interact With Images Projected From Your Phone – NYTimes.com.
Scroll to 58 seconds in this video from Penguin books on planned iPad content. The Human Body Anatomy book with 3D simulations of the heart looks interesting.
-Michael
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The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a division of the National Institutes of Health has awarded, Dr. Lynn Fiellin, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine, $3.9 million over five years to develop and study a video game to teach children to avoid risky behaviors associated with HIV.
Following development, the game’s efficacy will then be tested in children 9-14 in New Haven, Conn.
There is an old New Yorker cartoon that features two dogs. One says to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Indeed, it has been common for people to hide behind fake personas online for most of the commercial life of the internet. Many did so with chat (remember AOL’s chat rooms?), and many do so with their avatars in Second Life and in online games (e.g. World of Warcraft).
But at least one place on the internet, what you see is what you get. A recent study shows, at least for subset of the population on Facebook, users present a truer representation of themselves.
see No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You | Wired Science | Wired.com.
This 3 year old Duke Visualization Friday video is fascinating, “Medical Imaging Simulation of Mice and Men”, by Paul Segars. Dr. Segars uses Voxelman data to build his own 3D NURBS based model of every organ, bone, nerve in the body. Then MRI data is combined from other colleagues to construct formulas for scaling the organs from 90th percentile to 10th percentile people as well as youth to elderly. Using a different set of data, they simulate heart and lung movement, both independently and then as a complete body system. Finally to complete their “phantom” patient, they generate photo realistic MRI data sets for the given organ constructs, complete with disease conditions.
Go to iTunesU and search for Paul Segars.
-Michael
I’d be surprised if this video hasn’t gone viral in the Medical Simulation community. Check out “If it Weren’t for You” for a laugh.
Then screen down on the livinginsim.com site for an ad for Havidol – When more isn’t enough.
Interesting article that mirrors our own frustrations with Second Life as a virtual reality engine. We look forward to seeing progress on Duke’s OpenCobalt project.
Thanks to Amy Coppedge for this reference.
-Michael
NPR featured a story about a small puzzle that is giving this month’s big game releases, Bioshock 2 and Dante’s Inferno, competition for user buzz. The addictive game, called Chime, features donated music from the likes of Moby and Philip Glass. The game combines features of puzzle games like Tetris with real-time remixing of music.
Chime is the first release of and industry charity project called OneBigGame (60 percent of the purchase price goes to charitable foundations benefiting children).
via Video Game Lets You Drop Beats As You Drop Blocks : NPR.