“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
” “Commons-Based Peer Productionâ€. It’s a revolution in how things are made, by whom, and in what quantities. In some ways, the future looks a lot like the past. These blacksmiths are making a local solution to a local problem. And we’re going to be seeing a lot more of… Continue reading
On November 30 and December 1 the conference “MetaMeets 2012. The Art of Creation : Virtuality meets Reality†takes place (‘s-Hertogenbosch,The Netherlands). MetaMeets is a seminar/meeting about virtual worlds, augmented reality and 3D internet, this year’s topic will be The Art of Creation : Virtuality meets Reality. Virtual worlds and… Continue reading
In an open ended, user-generated virtual environment, you get that exciting feeling that you can build your own world. You just start creating objects and scripting them, following the tutorials and getting help from community members. It’s a kind of ‘makers ethos’ which increasingly permeates the ‘real world’. Of course,… Continue reading
“The idea is to design more realistic virtual characters, which, in turn, should make video games more compelling and software simulations used for training more useful. In the future, the software could drive physical robots capable of navigating the real world in a human-like manner.” Okay, the bots are not… Continue reading
I’m working on my final written assignment for the Gamification Course at Coursera (our professor is Kevin Werbach, The Wharton School, Univ. of Pennsylvania). One of the most inspiring comments were made during the interview by Werbach of Amy Jo Kim, an expert in game design, gamification and and ‘the… Continue reading
One of the big inspirations for the MixedRealities blog is the book Race against the machine, written by the MIT-researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. These last few days I’ve read another book about globalization and exponentially growing technologies, Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think, by the engineer… Continue reading
What does it mean to be an avatar? Or should we say to ‘have’ an avatar? And what is an avatar: the thumbnail on a Twitter of Facebook account? The 3D characters in World of Warcraft or in Second Life? The textual description of a character in a text-only roleplaying… Continue reading
Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life, is about to launch two non-Second Life products: Creatorverse and Patterns. Creatorverse is an iPad-app: Patterns will be a ‘new 3D creative environment’. Virtual World-watcher Wagner James Au says on New World Notes that Linden Lab no longer has as… Continue reading
I’ve just finished reading The Rapture of the Nerds, written by Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow. It’s an often almost dream-like book about life in the era of the technological singularity. Wikipedia explains: The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.Since the capabilities of… Continue reading