I first read about the (Oct 2008) sales of video games is the only number that’s “up” during this economy turmoil…
The Nov 2008 sales figure for video games has just been released and it is closed to 3 billion dollars in US alone! Truly amazing! I guess people are trying to escape from the stressful real world by engaging in virtual worlds. Perhaps the video game industry can bail out the rest of the industries… 
Came across SimAuthor, a Northern Colorado company that specializes in Flight Simulation. They appeared to garner customers from all over the place: military sectors, flight and aviation industry, and university with an aviation program. (Why is SIUC not listed?)
But what’s really interesting (to me) is their flight training analysis software… of course we are talking about AAR here. As always, I failed to understand why the instructional technology folks are simply NOT getting this. Isn’t this kind of training and analysis important to our field? I do believe it was what started or field… but then somewhere in the past, a folk in the road appeared, and people have been travelling down the other path.
Oh, well, you can’t win them all.
You have heard and even used SecondLife, but have you heard of SecondHeath – the SecondLife’s healthcare virtual world from United Kingdom?
Second Health is located in the SciLands, a specialised region of Second Life for Science, Technology and Educational applications. Most of these projects are about professional and patient education, collaboration and health strategy.
This is an experimental, innovative and efficient means of communicating complex healthcare messages as well as illustrating what healthcare of the future could look like.
The design of the virtual hospital in Second Health is based on the principles and recommendations outlined in the recently published Healthcare for London: A Framework for Action.
WebMonkey has a short write-up about Twitter’s StreamGraph. This is a new text-mining product by Twitter (after it acquired Summize. It visually maps the latest 200 tweets containing a particular given word/phrase. One can also mine a user’s Twitter contribution using the “@user” search function call.
StreamGraph for
“The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph. You can click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window. If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods it will be useful to click in the area to the left of the y-axis in order to change the vertical scale.”
The video and computer games are gaining traction in the enterprise and educational arenas as a means to teach new skills to a generation of young adults raised on video games. According to marketing consultancy The Apply Group, between 100 and 135 of the Global Fortune 500 will use gaming for instructional applications by 2012. [citation]
IBM has quite a bit of resources in Serious Games, if one know where to look.
Yesterday, the Reuter ran an interesting report about LittleBigPlanet (see excerpt below). I am interested less so about the game per se, but more so in the “moddable” aspect of it. It seemed that a “toolkit” will be given so that players can create and share player-created levels after they are done with the game’s original campaign (about 50 levels or so).
Sony Computer Entertainment America’s”LittleBigPlanet” game, released in North America on Tuesday, lets players create characters and scenarios for the PlayStation 3, taking the Internet’s embrace of community-created sites to video games.
The new game has 50 levels of play in a universe of castles and mountains where customizable sackcloth puppets must navigate obstacles and puzzles to proceed.
What separates it from the pack is a suite of tools, which allows players to create their own game challenges and share them with others online via Sony Corp’s PlayStation Network…
“The three pillars of the game are equal: play, create, and share,” said Ettouney, who co-founded the game’s development studio, Media Molecule.
Electronic Arts Inc has proven that empowering gamers is a good business decision these days. Gamers have populated the new “Spore” universe with over 25 million creatures, vehicles and buildings of their own creation. “Spore” PC and Nintendo DS games sold over 1 million copies worldwide in the first three weeks.
Billy Pidgeon, video game analyst for IDC, believes “LittleBigPlanet” will help Sony drive sales of its PS3. The PS3 lags Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii in total sales, but new games made by Sony exclusively for its machine may help it gain ground….
Ygdrasil is the Tree of Life in Norse mythology, and is also the main “character” in the “Tales of…” franchise (such as the Tales of Symphonia, and Tales of Phantasia). The proper spelling (I believe) is Yggdrasil (i.e. with double-”g”).
I know CAVE is considered to be an older-technology; but you never know. One of these days it may just come back. [ref: Pape, D.; Anstey, J.; Dolinsky, M.; and Dambik, E.J. (Aug, 2003). Ygdrasil: a framework for composing shared virtual worlds. Future Generation Computer Systems. 19:6 (pp. 1041-1049).]
VR Lab (Ygdrasil)
Ben Chang has a Ygdrasil User Guide on his website:
Ygdrasil is a simple scripting language for creating interactive, immersive environments in virtual reality. It is used specifically for creating virtual worlds in the CAVE, and is designed to be easy enough to use that even beginning programmers can pick it up quickly. Ygdrasil is particularly useful for artists, who can use it to create interactive VR artworks without advanced training in computer programming, or support from specialized engineers. Ygdrasil is used in CAVE’s worldwide, and can be used on a range of other kinds of VR systems or even just on a regular desktop PC.
Ygdrasil gets its name from the Tree of Life in Norse mythology and is often affectionately referred to as “Yg”. Ygdrasil was written by Dave Pape at the Electronic Visualization Lab at University of Illinois, Chicago, and is currently maintained there by Alex Hill.
Virtual reality is a technology that, until recently, has not been generally accessible, particularly for artists. While VR has been used for decades in science, engineering, medicine, and military simulators, both the cost and technical complexity of the systems have limited the availability of the technology in the arts, education, or even in entertainment. In recent years, rapid increases in computing power and falling prices have brought the cost of an immersive display system down significantly, opening new opportunities for museums, art galleries, schools, and other areas in the arts and humanities. However, affordable technology still needs to be usable - and this is where Ygdrasil comes in.
The main Ygdrasil home page is at http://www.evl.uic.edu/yg, where you will find the complete language reference, additional guides and tutorials, a user forum, and download and installation instructions for the most recent versions of the language. This guide is designed as a complement to the core documentation.
Ben’s course syllabus on Experimntal GameLab is an interesting “read”, too.
Bioware announced their year-long MMOG title today: Star Wars: The Old Republic. Errmmm, can’t say it is a surprise, because there have been much speculation about the title (since the huge success of KoTOR, and KoTOR II.
So Bioware is merely confirming what we “knew” all along… Good job! Bioware!
Video games are moving towards emotionally responsive character modelling. Well, that’s a mouth full, so let get the right lingo: Image Metrics.
Here’s a blog that talks about it. In the following video clip, Emily will demonstrate what image metrics are.
Not convinced? How about this one?
What? This is unbelievable. How many conferences are out there are showcasing Serious Games research and application?
1st IEEE International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications 2009 (VS-GAMES’09)
March 23 - 24, Coventry, UK
Official Site: http://www.vs-games.org.uk/
Context
The emergence of serious or non-leisure uses of games technologies and virtual world applications has been swift and dramatic over the last five years. As a result, there has been little time to develop the theoretical and academic rigour in the emerging field. This problem has been exacerbated by the largely technological drive of the technologies, with often little time to consider more user-centred approaches to design and use of serious applications of games and virtual world technologies. Another factor affecting the field has been the general aspects of convergence between new technologies, for example AI applications, augmented reality, mobile technologies, GPS technologies, sensor technologies and social software.
Together this has presented potential for developing new technologies based upon immersive and interactive interfaces and has in parallel produced many unanswered questions in terms of the usage of the formats. As a result there is a clear need to consider new frameworks, theories, methods and design
strategies for making serious applications of games and virtual world technologies more effective and useful as part of education, health and training.
Scope
The first IEEE International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications 2009 aims to meet the significant challenges of the cross-disciplinary community that work around these serious application areas by bringing the community together to share case studies of practice, to present new frameworks, methodologies and theories and to begin the process of developing shared cross-disciplinary outputs. In order to achieve this main aim the conference will pioneer new methods for bringing together
and supporting communities of practice emerging in themed areas beyond the duration of the conference. Using the conference as an ignition to support a wider aspiration to form and sustain a community of practice around the field. To achieve this, the team at the SGI will use innovative software called Intronetworks, which allows conference participants to create their own profile allowing them to identify like-minded and complementary skilled colleagues.
The term ‘Serious Games‘ covers a broad range of applications from flash-based animations to totally immersive and code driven 3D environments where users interface with large volumes of data through sophisticated and interactive digital interfaces. This shift towards immersive world applications being used to support education, health and training activities marks the beginning of new challenges that offer real scope for collaborative and multi-disciplinary research solutions, and real opportunities for innovative development. We invite researchers, developers, practitioners and decision-makers working with or applying serious games in their communities to present papers in the following two main streams of the conference: games and virtual world applications for serious applications.
Oh, and how everyone is talking about evaluation approaches… interesting.
