October 10, 2008

Second Life survey says: “Try it for work — you’ll like it”

The non-profit Social Research Foundation recently announced the results of its Second Life Annual Survey 2008, a Web-based survey of 1,258 Second Life residents who are part of the organization’s First Opinions Panel™. Thanks to Social Research Foundation, ThinkBalm was able to contribute a few questions about work-related usage of Second Life. Here are some […]

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August 20, 2008

The ThinkBalm Innovation Community has launched!

We are pleased to announce that today the ThinkBalm™ Innovation Community went live! The ThinkBalm Innovation Community is a new community dedicated to advancement of the Immersive Internet. The community, built on the Spigit™ serious game engine, is focused on work-related use of the Immersive Internet ― virtual worlds and campuses, immersive learning simulations, and […]

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August 14, 2008

Accenture recruiting in Second Life cost-effectively targets the “Facebook audience”

Global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company Accenture has 180,000 employees and offices in 49 countries and brings thousands of new employees on board every year. As you might imagine, recruitment in a professional services company this size is a mission-critical business process. Accenture is already quite successful with new college grads — BusinessWeek […]

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July 21, 2008

A realism model for Immersive Internet apps: Part I

Some of the vendor briefings we’ve participated in during the last six weeks have led to some pretty intense philosophical discussions. How is “virtual” different from “real?” How is “real” different from “realistic?” These questions are important to work through not as ethereal brainteasers but because 1) many people call this category we cover “virtual […]

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July 18, 2008

At Microsoft, cost of virtual events about 1/3 the cost of traditional events

In late June I spoke with Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) evangelist Zain Naboulsi about how Microsoft is using virtual worlds to strengthen the company’s relationships with customers via its technical communities. Microsoft has about 700 members in its MSDN developers group and about 150 members in its TechNet group. MSDN is for software developers while […]

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June 30, 2008

“First life” versus “fake life”— When realism is important in the Immersive Internet

At Dassault Systemes’ (DS) DevCon 2008 conference and industry analyst event in Paris on June 17th-18th one of the key themes was “life-like” or “first life” (which was a bit of a friendly dig against Linden Lab’s Second Life®) experiences in virtual environments – these are terms DS executives use to refer to hyper-realistic interactive experiences. […]

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June 3, 2008

Know when to fold ’em

With my background in genetics, protein biochemistry was never my favorite class. There was always a friendly rivalry between genetics and biochemistry, and it didn’t help that the biochemists always had prettier molecules than we did in our DNA and RNA.  So leave it to a team of biochemists to rub it in with the introduction of Fold-It (see […]

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June 3, 2008

MMORPG guild leaders: Gurus in the midst

One of the strengths of virtual worlds like Second Life and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like Dungeons and Dragons Online (see figure below) is a facility to create user-defined groups and for people to self-organize into teams, or guilds. In game environments, player groups form around performing a mission: a challenge created and pre-defined […]

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