Toward a Metaverse Future Society!

AvaCon announces: AvaCon has exciting things planned for 2013! We are working on new initiatives to connect and support the communities and people involved in co-creating and using the metaverse, including new events, a new membership-led community organization (coming soon!), and our latest call for proposals for the recently launched… Continue reading

A virtual worlds community going beyond virtual worlds?

Fleep Tuque, a major virtual worlds community expert, said on her Google+ page that AvaCon, the organizers of the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) plans to include the open-source version of Second Life, OpenSim, and other platforms, in the upcoming gatherings (which will get another name). On the AvaCon website… Continue reading

Virtual communities on Google+

Getting tons of invites for communities on Google Plus. A limited selection: communities for Digital Culture (look for Ted Newcomb to get an invite), Second Life (288 members already), Second Life Arts (135 members), Opensim Virtual (‘First there was Second Life, then there was Freedom), MetaMeets (3D internet conference), Augmented… Continue reading

What does the success of Minecraft mean?

‘Could Minecraft be the next great engineering school?’ Scott Smith asks at Quartz. He explains that Minecraft can be considered as a particularly interesting MOOC – and an example of peer2peer learning. Minecraft has become a kind of anarchic massive open online course (MOOC) all on its own, without developing… Continue reading

Changing the world while exiting the trough of disillusionment

I’m recovering from the second MetaMeets day, but here comes my report about the second part of this two-day conference in the beautiful ‘s Hertogenbosch (the Netherlands). This day was hands-on: we had a workshop during which we learned to use sculptris to make a model, meshlab to clean it… Continue reading

‘Virtual worlds are not dead, they only smell funny’

Allow Flufee McFluff to introduce this post about the first day of the MetaMeets conference: [iframe] [/iframe] You can find the mindmap on which my own presentation (slideshow) was based in the previous post. I update the mindmap in function of what I learn during this two day-conference. Some highlights… Continue reading

WordPress Brings Bitcoin to the Blogging Masses | Webmonkey

“Upgrading your WordPress.com blog no longer requires a credit card or PayPal account. Starting today you can raid your virtual piggy bank to pay for WordPress upgrades with the digital currency Bitcoin.” This is interesting. How ‘virtual’ is bitcoin anyway? Maybe Linden Lab – the company behind Second Life –… Continue reading

MRUniversity: it’s not a massive open online course, but it could be used to create one

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two economics professors at George Mason University, launch Marginal Revolution University. They’ll deliver free, interactive courses in the economics space, so I read on Open Culture. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok run the blog Marginal Revolution. Some years ago, Cowen also was a guest at… Continue reading

New World Notes not convinced about 3D-printing

“No doubt, it’s going to be an important tool for hobbyists and designers, and for assorted applications here and there, but Wired wants to convince us it’s going to be more than that. ” There, Wagner James Au, the virtual worlds expert and New World Notes blogger, said it: he’s… Continue reading

The economics of video games

“Bloomfield is working on a platform, called the Synthetic Economy Research Environment, that could enable economists to produce games that simulate large-scale economic phenomenon like a central bank.” I often wondered whether professor Robert Bloomfield (Johnson School of Management at Cornell University) was still involved in virtual worlds research. He… Continue reading