Sun New Hires: Serious Games As Part Of The Onboarding Process

Corporate Gains from Serious Games

Via: Enspire Learning - Changing The Way People Learn

Sun Microsystems is a large company with businesses in various sectors of the technology industry. It employs over 33,900 people worldwide,has offices in dozens of countries, and sells products and services in many more.

In the summer of 2007, Sun commissioned a serious games vendor, Enspire Learning, to create two onboarding games, Dawn of the Shadow Specters and Rise of the Shadow Specters. The games were released in October of 2007 and made publically available on Sun’s website. New hires at Sun are encouraged to play them as an optional part of their onboarding process.

Sun's New Hire Experience is about accelerate, participate, learn, explore and play.

As with many technology companies, a sizable percentage of Sun’s employees work remotely. Many of these employees hardly see the office at all. While this is a considerable perk of working for Sun, it can leave employees feeling disconnected from their company. New hires are especially likely to be affected by such problems.

Sun recognized a need to strengthen the sense of community within its workforce. One of its efforts to do so entailed revamping its onboarding program, as a strong onboarding program shows employees that their company cares not only about training them, but welcoming them as well.

The games were designed to teach new hires about Sun, but this goal was secondary to making employees feel welcome, at home, and integrated into the Sun Microsystems culture.

The word "game" was the driving force in this endeavor. Sun wanted to give its new hires something to be excited about, to make them feel that Sun is a cool, fun place to work. The point was, and is, to have new hires fall in love with Sun right from their orientation.

Learner Profile

The Shadow Specter games were designed for a dual audience: prospective Sun employees and actual Sun employees.

Prospective Employees

The average age of a Sun employee is forty-two. While the collective work experience this affords is an asset, Sun would like to make better use of today’s large population of young, technologically oriented talent. Much of this talent has grown up playing and loving video games, from Pac-Man to Doom. Many have fond memories of the puzzle and platformer games of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Sun’s company vision is based around the concept of a connected world. In keeping with this thought, the Shadow Specter games were made publically accessible on Sun’s website. One hope was that this would reflect and advertise the fact that Sun, a proponent and creator of open source software, advocates sharing knowledge rather than hoarding it.

The assumption is that this would appeal to the ideals of many younger (and older) prospective employees. Sun hopes to impress its merits as an employer and belief in its vision upon current, emerging, and future members of the workforce. The intention is to make the recruiting benefits of the games last for years to come.

Current Employees

While the Shadow Specter games were designed with prospective employees in mind, their content must inform current and new employees about Sun, who are often middle aged or older. Such employees may or may not enjoy the kind of action-based play associated with video games.

It was the belief of game developers that, while generational gaps are a concern with video games, this problem would not necessarily extend to other kinds of games. The thinking was that employees of any generation would appreciate a fun and entertaining welcome, provided that this welcome actually is entertaining and fun. The Shadow Specter games, would, hopefully, increase employee enthusiasm for Sun’s community, which would in turn increase the sense of community within the company itself.

The backstory as well as further considerations on making or comissioning Serious Games are all included in Enspire Learning's release of a new whitepaper featuring the Shadow Specter Games, “Serious Gains from Serious Games: Solving Business Problems with Custom Games”.

This is a useful read for anyone interested in learning how to design a serious game to accomplish a variety of business objectives from creating an effective training program to increasing employee morale to marketing a product.

Download this free whitepaper, if you’d like to know how a Serious Game can help you meet these and other business goals or if you’re curious about how the “Shadow Specter Games” were designed.

Technorati Tags: serious games seriousgames future-making serious games corporate games

When Learning ESL Becomes A Serious Game

Serious Games helping students develop their English

Via: Larry Ferlazzo Websites

At Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, CA, educators have turned to technology to help ESL (English As Second Language) students develop their English and spread it to their families by reading together.

The program, dubbed the Family Literacy Project, was the brainchild of teacher Larry Ferlazzo, and has enabled many of the school’s Hmong immigrants to get free computers and DSL service in their homes.

LAB WORK

Ferlazzo’s ESL students have profoundly improved their English literacy through use of the computer lab before, during, and after school.

Like most good technology programs, Burbank High’s began in a computer lab.

In January 2005, Ferlazzo convinced school administrators to open the lab before and after school so his class of 21 ESL students could practice their English.

Ferlazzo put together a website for his students, where they could access a variety of free, animated stories on the Internet. The stories were designed to boost literacy. The ESL students loved them; the program took off.

After an upgrade to the lab refreshed the computers, Ferlazzo paved the way for the school to give the old machines to his ESL students to use for further practice at home.

With the machines disbursed, the school then ironed out deals with a variety of local Internet service providers to provide connectivity. Ferlazzo even convinced the ISPs to provide the school with one central monthly bill, as opposed to billing each individual family, which the school paid via a grant from a private foundation.

Ferlazzo says that assessments taken before and after the launch of the program showed that students and parents in the program had nearly double the improvement in their English reading ability compared to a control group.

After seeing the data, the district agreed to fund an expansion of the project to about 60 new families in 2007, to include Spanish speakers and Pacific Islanders as well as more Hmong newcomers.

Ferlazzo says the district simply did the math: “A 33 percent gain each for four or five students per family for a cost of $22 per family per month for the DSL service seemed like a pretty good payoff.”

What’s more, Ferlazzo’s students have begun to create their own English - learning activities.

They are giving instructions on how to play online video games they designed in minutes on Sploder (http://sploder.com/) a free website where students can quickly create a game, play others that have been designed by their peers in the class, write online comments about what they thought of them, and discuss their experiences with each other.

This is just one example how Larry Ferlazzo uses online video games as a language development activity.

Larry is always interested in exploring new ways to engage students in English language learning activities that are easy to maneuver, engaging to do, and promote face-to-face conversation.

There are many online games that offer educational activities. Larry has recently written an article The Best Online Learning Games — 2007, where he shares his picks for the best twelve online learning games of the year.

All the games on this list should be accessible, challenging, and fun for English Language Learners and native-English speakers alike (of all ages), except for two or three that are obviously for Beginning English Language Learners. He has particularly tried to include sites where students can create great games, too.

Read Also Avatar Languages - Real Teaching In A Virtual World

Learn a Language in Second Life at http://www.avatarlanguages.com/

Technorati Tags:serious games seriousgames future-making serious games education games

$9 Bi: Microsoft's Conservative Estimate For The Serious Games Market

Microsoft Gets On The Serious Games Bandwagon

Via: BusinessWeek - Microsoft's Games Get Serious

Innovation December 21, 2007

Following my prior post Microsoft Shaping The Serious Games Movement Into A Multi-Billion Dollar Market, where I state that "by no means would Microsoft join either a current $ 150 million dollar market or a to-be $ 1 billion market only in 2011" (as projected by a few sources), BusinessWeek has published an article this week where David Boker, senior director of the Business Development Group at Microsoft's Aces Studio, one of Microsoft's game studios where ESP was developed, says Microsoft conservatively estimates this market at $9 billion.

Contextualizing the $ 9 Billion Market Size - Under MS Perspective

"Up until 2007, we haven't had time or energy to invest in that sort of thing," Boker says. "However, we knew the market was there. And it became clear how we could capitalize on that." The strategy—to explore new ways of finding a new revenue stream for an old title. It is an interesting, lateral leap for Microsoft—or any entertainment game maker.

The Serious Games market is currently valued at about $150 million, according to Ben Sawyer, president of the Portland (Me.) consulting firm Digitalmill and co-director of the Serious Games Initiative. While not huge, that's nearly three times more than in 2005, according to Sawyer's estimates, and growth looks set to continue.

Then there's the larger simulation and 3-D modeling market (which includes military training sims, design prototyping, and educational software for a variety of corporate and school settings).

This market does overlap with Serious Games, and it's so vast that it's hard to quantify, so it poses a much larger, tempting potential revenue stream. Boker says Microsoft conservatively estimates this market at $9 billion, based on its internal tally of various analyst forecasts from Frost & Sullivan and other sources, as well as proprietary research.

In theory at least, Microsoft ESP can be used by designers working on digital prototypes of, say, cockpits, and not only companies working on flight simulations. That's just one way the platform might cross over.

Easy Customization

The Microsoft ESP product is meant to appeal to designers and non designers alike. The familiar Windows-based environment allows for easy customization of scenes to include immersive 3D visuals.

This snowy crater illustrates the level of detail that's possible with the software-without writing any code.

Microsoft's New Market Entry - A Threat To Smaller Studios?

It's the first time a major software company has entered the Serious Games arena with a product to help other corporations build their own employee-training video games in-house via a simple, Windows-based program.

And priced at only $799 per license, Microsoft ESP poses a cost-effective threat to smaller studios that develop custom games—at a cost of $500,000 and up per game—for corporations, hospitals, and the armed forces.

For years, companies such as military contractor Northrop Grumman (NOC) had contacted Microsoft, asking if they could license the game engine for Flight Simulator.

"Since the late 1990s, there have been ongoing inquiries to our game studio by various companies who ask, 'Can we use this for training? How can we make it do this or that?'" recalls David Boker. But at first, Microsoft wasn't interested.

MS Concluded Serious Games Are Worth Pursuing

By 2006, Boker says, Microsoft employees in the enterprise software side of the company started paying attention to increasing buzz around video game industry events such as the Serious Games Summit, a semi-regular conference on educational, military, and staff-training games. Boker adds that many of his colleagues also frequently discussed research on how people under 40 have grown up with video games, and how games could potentially be used as a learning tool.

These incidents, along with the ongoing requests for Flight Simulator to be licensed or adapted for corporate and other non-entertainment uses—and a series of 250 interviews Microsoft conducted with members of the U.S. military and various international governments and academic institutions—convinced the software maker that the market was real and Serious Games were worth pursuing.

In the Cockpit

Microsoft hopes that designers of airplanes will gravitate toward its ESP platform.

The company is pitching it as a way to create quick three-dimensional mock-ups of dashboards and instruments, as well as lighting schemes, so they can experiment with ideas for a pilot's environment.

MS New Involvement - A Possible Tipping Point For Serious Games, Saving Time & Money

Observers see Microsoft's new involvement as a possible tipping point for Serious Games—and as a sign that entertainment video game developers, publishers, and designers could also repurpose their products and game engines to generate new revenue streams.

Using Microsoft ESP could also pay off for the companies that opt to use it in terms of time and money saved when creating employee-training games.

Northrop Grumman, for instance, has been beta-testing the ESP platform and its early incarnations for the past several months. It saw significant slashes in budgets and schedules. One team used ESP to create a prototype of an aviation simulation training game—in only three days.

"Typically, the same type of simulation would have taken six to 18 months to make from scratch," says Randy Schmidt, a technical director at Northrop Grumman. "I was surprised." Schmidt says the Windows-based platform and the easy-to-use interface of the software made it simple to choose from a library of cockpit, terrain, and other design elements—all originally created for the Flight Simulator video game—and combine them with Northrop Grumman's own visuals and software.

Multiplayer Mode

A built-in VoIP feature allows each training simulation to function much like a multiplayer entertainment video game played online.

Using a broadband connection, as many as 30 employees around the world can engage in simultaneous training exercises within a serious game made using the Microsoft ESP platform.

Seen here is a screenshot of the earth seen from outer space, created using ESP. Employees in offices in different countries, for example, might be able to act as co-pilots on a manned spacecraft mission using a training game made with ESP.

Schmidt adds that to build a complete training aviation simulation—beyond the prototype phase—with realistic 3D graphics from scratch and for a military customer, could still cost well into the tens of millions of dollars. But the cost savings, in terms of purchasing the $799 license for Microsoft ESP that can be used for multiple Serious Games, is vast, he says.

The Windows interface is designed so that in-house designers can create a simulation without writing new code (so no expense of hiring an outside developer). "The entertainment-game graphics are quite realistic," he says. "Some of the military sims look like poor-man's versions of video games."

But Schmidt also says Northrop Grumman won't stop experimenting with other Serious Games platforms.

The company is still seeing how it can use the online virtual world Second Life for training games. Northrop Grumman is also continuing to work with Hunt Valley (Md.)-based Breakaway Ltd., which makes a competing do-it-yourself software platform called mosbe that allows companies to create custom training games, and which has a long history of creating training sims for the military, hospitals, and even bank auditors and consulting firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton.

MS Binding Learning Curve

Microsoft is certainly the new kid on the block when it comes to Serious Games, so it might still have some lessons to learn when adapting the ESP platform to have the widest market appeal possible.

Scot Shiflett, visual systems team lead in the analysis, simulations, systems engineering, and training business unit at Science Applications International, a San Diego-based technology company with a variety of products ranging from robotic testing devices to storm-warning systems—and another company Microsoft allowed to beta-test ESP—says the software platform is lacking some crucial elements.

"Right now, ESP meets some FAA requirements in terms of commercial flight simulators. [But some are] not there yet," he says.

For instance, ESP doesn't allow designers to create an on-screen display with what's called multichannel synchronization. This means images must match up in real time if shown in different frames onscreen—so there's no chance of pilot confusion. Currently, this is an FAA requirement for commercial airline simulators, Shiflett says—but one that was apparently not addressed in ESP's offerings. Getting the virtual world to match this FAA requirement will only help Microsoft to win more business in that area, he adds.

But Microsoft is already working on version 2.0 of the ESP platform, Boker says.

The next round will feature additional types of graphics, including ground and sea environments. Currently, the imagery only features scenes of the earth as seen from above, because it's focused at the aviation industry. Future versions will expand the product's reach, so companies that focus on security, or potentially even other industries, from health care to sales teams in a variety of fields, can also build their own training games.

Buzz is building around ESP, and it's sure to continue. During the Serious Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference in February—the gaming world's must-attend yearly summit—Boker and his team will present the final version of ESP to attendees.

This high-profile venue will expose ESP, which will still be relatively fresh off its Jan. 1 launch, to a wider audience than the military-training trade shows where its early stages were previewed.

Whether or not ESP takes off and proves to be a lucrative new revenue stream, the Microsoft brand name is sure to gain attention in the Serious Games arena among customers and competitors alike.

It's already resulting in a more serious look at the growing Serious Games market overall.

Technorati Tags: serious games seriousgames future-making serious games serious games market

Argosy: Virtually Human Serious Games

Serious Games challenging us discover human body like never before

Via: Argosy Publishing and Argosy Medical Animation - Serious Games to discover human body like never before

Argosy Publishing is an award-winning provider of content and technology to the medical, pharmaceutical, scientific, consumer products, television, and educational communities.

When it comes to transforming content so it can seamlessly shift between print, web and portable devices, Argosy is the is the ideal choice as a forward-thinking information provider.

Argosy's medical animation, illustration, and programming style and methodologies have produced outstanding results for clients for the past 16 years.

Argosy’s suite of services includes animation, Flash and interactive production, on-line learning, content development, and programming (XML, HTML, Java, and C++).

Hypertension

Argosy’s seasoned staff of Medical illustrators and animators is lead by their visual director who has a master’s degree in medical illustration from Johns Hopkins University. He has over 20 years of experience developing complex bio-medical productions.

Their clients include: Pfizer, Kimberly-Clark, Pearson, Novartis, McGraw-Hill, Eli Lilly, Thomson, Reed Elsevier, Abbot Labs, Houghton Mifflin, Astrazeneca, and Genentech to name a few.

Team members’ backgrounds include a BFA in Medical Illustration from The Cleveland Institute of Art/Case Western Reserve University in addition to a Master of Arts in Medical and Biological Illustration from the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD; and multiple BAs from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Medical Illustration.

Virtual Cell Tour

Osteoporosis

Nicotine

Angioplasty

The Visible Body

Argosy's Visible Body is a most comprehensive human anatomy visualization tool. This entirely Web-delivered application offers an unparalleled understanding of the human body. The Visible Body includes over 1,700 anatomical structures, including all major organs and systems of the human body.

The Visible Body consists of highly detailed, anatomically accurate, 3D models of all human body systems. The models were developed by an extensively trained team with decades of experience in medical illustration and biomedical visualization. All anatomical content has been reviewed for accuracy by our panel of experts, including physicians and anatomists. The beta release includes content covered in an undergraduate-level Anatomy and Physiology course. Years of modeling and enhancement make it the most sophisticated and complete 3D model of the human body available.

Free To Use, Free To Register

Register now with a valid email address to get started. Once registered, you can launch the Visible Body Web application from any PC* connected to the Internet. The application will guide you through the download of any browser plug-ins needed. No CD-ROM or additional software download is necessary

Illustration Source: Medical Illustration Source Book - Portfolios Online

The Medical Illustration Source Book is a definitive resource for medical and scientific illustration, animation and multimedia.

The Source Book introduces you to most talented artists working today. They have the scientific training and knowledge to understand your challenge, your choice of media and your audience. What is not seen is the collaborative process that takes place between you (the art buyer or thought leader) and the scientific image creator. These brilliant individuals offer a depth of knowledge and commitment to scholarship that reflects a lifetime of learning. Their unique ability to communicate with research scientist, physician, attorney and layman allows an assignment to have dimension, life and humanity. Their ability to draw, paint, photograph and to harness visual computing technology translates thousands of words into powerful, engaging images.



Technorati Tags:medgames serious games seriousgames future-making serious games

Mapping The Serious Games Industry Within The UK

Via: SGI - Serious Games Institute Projects - West Midlands the most active region in terms of Serious Games

The West Midlands (UK) region is fast becoming recognized as one of the key EU regions with regard to the development of Serious Games.

Coventry University has taken the lead in two projects that are about:

a) showcasing the innovative credentials of the West Midlands Serious Games industry, called Diversify the Games Industry and

b) carrying out a mapping of the Serious Games Industry within the UK, and take a global snap shot to map where the UK fits into the worldwide perspective, called Serious Games Exposed.

Results so far have shown the West Midlands to be the most active in the UK in terms of Serious Games.

A variety of new Serious Games products are currently in development within the West Midlands region which will be available to purchase in the near future.

David Wortley, Director, SGI says the "Diversify the Games Industry" project is an initiative to create opportunities for electronic games and related digital media companies to develop their business by involvement in the Serious Games sector.

The Serious Games Exposed project is funded by AWM (Advantage West Midlands) under the Interactive Digital Media Project. Digital 2.0 has partnered with the Serious Games Institute to carry out the project, and shall complete it by March 2008.

This project has been defined and set up through the recognition of gaps in the Serious Games market which required attention in order for the industry to grow.

By investigating companies defining themselves as serious Games companies, and those who will compliment the sector, readily available products will be sectioned out to create an on-line brochure, allowing ease of use for prospective buyers.

The final part of this study is to carry out an effectiveness study on select games.

About the Interactive Digital Media Project

The Interactive Digital Media project is managed by Birmingham City University and funded by Advantage West Midlands.

The project main objective is to establish the West Midlands as a key player in the emerging industry of Serious Games. The partners, Birmingham University, Coventry University and Warwick University, all have strong links to the Serious Games industry. This coupled with a strong group of games developers, puts the region in a position to drive the industry and is fast become the centre of the emerging industry in the UK, if not for Europe.

The project is actively pursuing organisations, both private and public, that wish to partner with and benefit from the region’s wealth of talent, resources and commitment to growing the Serious Games industry.

About Advantage West Midlands

Advantage West Midlands is the Regional Development Agency (RDA) for the West Midlands. They are one of nine RDAs in England that were established to transform the English regions through sustainable economic development.

Their role is to lead the economic development of the West Midlands, working alongside a wide range of public, private and voluntary sectors partners to help our region to prosper - building upon their many strengths and addressing their unique challenges.

Advantage West Midlands has an annual budget of more than £300 million to invest in the economic development of the West Midlands and, at any one time, is managing around 2,500 projects which are changing the lives of people right across the region.

About Digital 2.0

Digital2.0 exists to help people understand games, and games technology, primarily for serious purposes.

Digital2.0 helps to make this less complicated: they understand how games, games technology and virtual 3D environments, could be used to solve business issues.

Digital 2.0 has worked with a range of clients from public to private sector and have experience at all stages of Serious Games development.

Technorati Tags: serious games seriousgames future-making serious games serious games market

Serious Games To Build Anything & Play Everything From Anywhere

Serious Games enabling users to make virtual spaces from simple building blocks

Via: VentureBeat, CrunchBase and Terra Nova

Metaplace, launched by San Diego-based Areae (please find my January post Serious Games: MMOs Raising Millions In Venture Capital), is a site on which amateur designers can create their own games and virtual worlds. The concept may sound familar; similar ideas are in operation at other networks.

Nevertheless, Areae's Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize this area, enabling users to make virtual spaces from simple building blocks.

They're doing their best to break down the walls around the currently walled gardens. This is a huge development that could change how we think of virtual worlds.

How is Metaplace different from all the other "do it yourself" platforms and such that are in development?

Lots of ways, not least of which is the very low threshold to entry that people have to cross to create their own microworld. As the site says:

"Our goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it's just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs."

Metaplace-created virtual spaces are expected to be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce. They can be embedded into your Facebook page, MySpace page, or your own blog via a flash-based client widget.

Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.

Each of the virtual worlds can be completely different including virtual apartments for decorating, plazas where readings and musical events happen, space-action games, full-blown MMORPGs, casual games, and Amazon storefronts.

How Metaplace Works

Raph Koster - Founder

"Back when the original Areae website was launched, we said that we wanted to make virtual worlds work the way the Web does. Looking back, a lot of people assumed we meant that sort of metaphorically. But in fact, we meant it very literally."

They've used as many web standards as possible, so you could make a game that was also a website, or a world populated with web data. Even the client can be re-written for whatever platform you want.

Koster showing one of the virtual worlds his site can create

"We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else's world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games... and set up doorways from one to the other. Basically, coming to work in the morning is a lot of fun."

Read Raph Koster's full testimonial on "How It Works" http://www.metaplace.com/blog/9.html

About Metaplace Strategy

Metaplace has a two-pronged strategy: Coders and designers develop gaming platforms, and users build atop the platforms to invent their own environments. They can pull in games, images and videos from other places.

Although quite a few individual games have allowed users to build atop their worlds, Koster hopes that his startup will be able to grow into something exponentially larger.

However, big questions remain for this company. Do people really want to mashup their worlds? Other, bigger virtual worlds like Second Life have APIs that give developers and users more options.

As of its launch late September 2007, Metaplace only has about four different templates for game creation, created by the Metaplace team. The number could someday grow to thousands. With that many designs available, users would have a nearly infinite array of tools at their disposal to create their own games.

Technorati Tags:serious games seriousgames future-making serious games virtual worlds

Serious Games For Anyone To Make The World Of Their Dream

Serious Games generating an immersive community hub

Via: VastPark - From the Founder, Features and Gallery

“Dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible” - T.E. Lawrence

“VastPark is a virtual content platform that enables you to create and deploy your own 3D virtual world within minutes.

Play with ideas, add physics, trial concepts and publish them online. You might not have used 3D before, but you can do this!”

According to Bruce Joy, VastPark Founder & CEO, VastPark's tools are digital crayons for a new medium. Although VastPark suits creating virtual worlds, you may find it useful for many purposes including: digital puppetry, interactive 3D PowerPoint presentations, game creation and immersive exploration of architecture.

Already in its 'beta' form, VastPark is a significant step forward in enabling the dreamer inside you to dream and for others to share and participate in your worlds.

“Grow Your Own” – VastPark’s Value Proposition

VastPark team is working hard to ensure that the platform can be adopted by online communities, corporations, individuals and indie developers alike.
They hope you will download the software, play with it, get involved and come to love this new medium.

VastPark Background - Web Needing an Infusion of Game Technology

"Back in 1999, Bruce Joy realized that the Web needed an infusion of game technology to form a new multi-user medium that was part-Web, Game, Social space and 'Interactive TV'.

At the time he had been working in media for a decade and a life changing event led to him to think about a whole new medium. He envisaged an online medium of communication and collaboration with the flexibility of being able to rearrange your own virtual atomic building blocks and instantly re-link them onto other people's virtual blocks. This had the potential to build whole new economies around it: new ways of thinking about persistent gaming, even new ways of 'traveling' between offices and engaging in online social activities.

It was not until the start of 2003 that he was ready to hire engineers. Since then they’ve continued to focus on the tough questions: how to scale the virtual web up to millions of worlds; how to connect them together; and how to solve the infrastructure issues so that no one person or company 'owns' the virtual web. Although their 'beta' software implementation requires Microsoft Windows®, their underlying framework is absolutely cross-platform and non-device specific.

With VastPark, organizations can build a virtual hub for their online communities that contains their own and user generated virtual worlds and so much more that can be linked together to form a seamless web of independent worlds.

Current Status

Right now they're focusing on helping developers understand their tools through a private beta community. Before Xmas, the Creator tool will have its first open beta release. It’s when they also aim to offer the first closed beta release of their Asset Publisher.

Technorati Tags:serious games seriousgames future-making serious games virtual worlds

Serious Games Creating In-Person Meeting Experience Over The Network

Serious Games making remote conferee present in the room

Via: TelepresenceWorld.net - Telepresence Tech and Teleportel Team with Sony and Imago to Launch New Era in 3D HD Telepresence

Telepresence has arrived...It may change the way we hold meetings, communicate, conduct business and operate globally.

Telepresence creates a live, face-to-face meeting experience with remote participants life-size with fluid motion and accurate flesh-tones and flawless audio!

As effective as an in-person meeting, telepresence meetings capture every interaction, comment and movement as if everyone is in the same room interacting and communicating.

Sony, the media and electronics giant, recently announced that they are partnering with Belgian based Teleportel Europe N.V., the European distribution and support arm of Duffie White’s TelePresence Tech organization and Imago, one of Europe’s leading video conferencing integrators, to “bring unparalleled realism to video conferencing applications with 3D TelePresence™.”

The system combines Duffie’s three-dimensional technology with Sony’s PCS-HG90 HD codec and high-definition displays to create a telepresence solution that truly establishes a sense of presence among its participants.

For many people, when they think of commercial telepresence solutions, they immediately envision a wall-sized array of plasma screens opposite a mirror-image conference table in a room designed to mimic a seamless environment.

Duffie White’s vision of telepresence, however, has always been a bit different from other developers. Duffie, who is the founder of TelePresence Technologies, LLC, with offices in Dallas, Texas, (http://www.telepresencetech.com/), , wants you to believe that a remote conferee is actually present in the room with you, not just on a screen on the wall.

He accomplishes this with an advanced optical setup that creates a view of the remote person that seems to appear physically at the conference table with genuine eye contact.

Currently, TelePresence Tech systems are in operation in 15 countries with customers using codecs from all the major video conferencing companies. While the TelePresence Tech (TPT) display systems will remain compatible with all of the codecs in the market, the announcement by Sony provides validation of the value of the 3D TelePresence™ solution and matches the TPT products with the exceptional quality of the Sony G90.

Currently, a “rollabout” 3D conferencing model without the 50-inch display or the codec is available for $30,000 US, which can total between $40,000 to $70,000 depending on the specification of the codec and monitor.

The new 3D systems are ideal for intimate “one-to-few” or “few-to-many” telepresence situations, such as academic lectures, training sessions, or board meetings with a remote CEO. Both Teleportel’s and TelePresence Tech’s websites suggest many other applications, including use in medical evaluation carts, retail banking offices, virtual reception desks, point of sales kiosks, etc.

TelePresence Room

In May of 2007, TelePresence Tech announced the development of 3D TelePresence Room™.

Instead of facing a wall of flat screens, the 3D TelePresence Room™ creates the illusion that a small group of remote participants are physically in the three-dimensional setting of the room.

The local and remote groups maintain eye contact through integrated cameras which are aligned between individuals. 3D TelePresence Rooms™ are currently being built simultaneously in Dallas, Texas and Brussels, Belgium.

Upcoming Telepresence World Events

Telepresence World events offer you the opportunity to experience live, real world demonstrations of telepresence technology from a variety of telepresence solution providers.

To experience telepresence solutions in person, plan now to attend one of the Upcoming Telepresence World Events:

LONDON18-19 March, 2008 London, UK

WASHINGTON21-22 May, 2008 Washington, DC


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Serious Games As Customer Touchpoints

Serious Games emerging as places where consumers can shop

Via: Virtual World News

By 2010, says Gartner, 20% of global Tier 1 retailers will have some kind of marketing presence in online games and virtual worlds.

In Gartner's predictions for what changes 2008 will bring for consumers and retail, the research group also looked a little further. It predicts that by 2010 20% of Tier I retailers will have a marketing presence in virtual worlds. It also predicts that through 2012 the number of consumers using mobile phones to shop will increase at an average of 25% per year.

Gartner Predicts 2008: How Shoppers and Technology Will Change Retail

Consumers are increasingly using technology to customize the shopping process to their specific needs. Retailers must understand how consumers are interacting with their brands as this will have a substantial impact on how retail operations will evolve in the future.

By 2010, 20 percent of global Tier 1 retailers will have a marketing presence in online games and virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are expanding rapidly. To date, Second Life has nearly 11 million registered ‘residents’ who spend in excess of $1million every 24 hours buying property, items or experiences in-world. Similarly, Gartner expects the popularity of online gaming to continue to expand.

These virtual worlds and video games are emerging as places where consumers can shop and retailers need to be ready to respond to this growing demand.

Gartner recommends that retailers:

* Expand your definition of customer touchpoints to include virtual worlds and online games.

* Develop trial criteria prior to launching a presence in virtual worlds and measure the results.

* Monitor innovation in retail activity in virtual worlds and online games, particularly if you are targeting a younger demographic.

* Target the right environment for your customer: In Asia/Pacific this might be in online games. In North America, younger generations may be in social networks such as MySpace and The Sims2 while Generations X and Y may be in Second Life. In addition, it could be in retail with H&H collaboration with The Sims2 namely the Sims2 H&M Fashion Stuff.

Through 2012, the number of consumers using mobile phones to shop will increase at an average of more than 25 per cent per year. Gartner expects Asia and Europe will take the lead.

Mobile commerce has been viewed as an emerging new sales channel for retailers for some time now but retail revenue through mobile phones is currently insignificant, much less than 1 per cent of total sales. However, as mobile phones evolve in form and function, the impact of the mobile phone on retail sales is set to increase.

Through 2010, consumers will use the phone as part of their shopping activities to search, browse, find locations and check stock. Eventually, consumers will use mobile phones to purchase merchandise and an example of this includes event tickets. Gartner’s advice to retailers is:

* Plan how consumers will access your retail sites via mobile phone over the next two years. Decide what information and activities they will want to ‘pull’ to their devices and what you need to do to ‘push’ that information and invest accordingly.

* Decide if the mobile Web will be simply an extension of your website or and entirely different interaction touchpoint. If you want consumers to access you via the mobile Web today, you must deal with the specifics of each major carrier. Start out small, with very limited capabilities.

Virtualpix, have highly professional and well trained photographers covering the UK. They produce high quality bespoke virtual tours for a variety of clients for: the retail sector, international property, stadiums and sports facilities, corporate events and hospitality, conference centres, residential & commercial estate agents, shopping centres, hotels, restaurants, schools and universities.

Once the photographers have taken the images a technical team produces the full 360x360 degree virtual tours (not the more basic panoramic) tours. The IPIX virtual tours are produced in good sized windows, using the latest IPIX virtual tour technology.

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Serious Games Become Tangible Using Mobile Technology

Enhancing Serious Games with mobile technology

Via: Mildly Diverting - Possible Futures

What happens when the space you're exploring to unlock a narrative is the real world?

What happens when you apply that idea of episodes of a story being unlocked by moving through a space into the real world? There aren't many examples yet - but as mobile devices get smarter and quicker, the idea of a story becoming a game in real space gets closer.

Some ARGs - Alternate reality games - already play with this.

Interfaces are changing too - Playstation's EyeToy watches a player, and translates their gestures onto screen action. There's been a demo of a driving game controlled by an entire crowd leaning one way or the other to steer. Games are becoming tangible.

Here are some examples...

Making Dead History Come Alive Through Mobile Game-Play

This work in progress presents a design approach to digitally enhancing an existing paper-based game to support young students learning history at an archaeological site, by making use of advantages provided by mobile technology.

It requires minimal investment and changes to the existing site exhibition because it runs on the visitors’ own cellular phones. It is expected that game-play will trigger a desire to learn more about ancient history and to make archaeological visits more effective and exciting.

In Italy, the use of cellular phones by middle school students is very popular, that's why the authors have considered using games on handheld devices to achieve educational goals.

The project combines on site visit with mobile phones to create an active game for students at a historic site. Historia Ludens in Italy offers students opportunities to engage in historical sites rather than simply visit them.

(Read more at Teaching History with Augmented Reality)

area/code Makes Big Games

Big Games are large-scale, real-world games. A Big Game might involve transforming an entire city into the world's largest board game, or hundreds of players scouring the streets looking for invisible treasure, or a TV show reaching out to interact with real-time audiences nationwide.

These games have been commissioned and sponsored by advertising agencies, media firms, universities, and large consumer brands.

area/code was founded in early 2005 by Frank Lantz (bio) and Kevin Slavin (bio) and it has a HQ in Manhattan.

Crossroads is a GPS game developed for Boost Mobile handsets. In this 2-player game, players capture Manhattan intersections by moving through them. But they must beware the Baron Samedi, an invisible spirit who is in the grid with them. The combination of real and imaginary opponents creates an uncanny experience, and a new type of play.

Plundr is the world's first location-based PC game. Using state-of-the-art Wi-Fi Positioning System technologies (WPS), the game locates the user's computer in physical space and uses their location as part of the game.

The game itself is a pirate adventure, in which players move from island to island to buy, sell and fight for goods. Depending on where you are in the physical world, you'll find different islands, different market prices and different ships to fight.

Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA)

A Nokia research project could one day make it easier to navigate the real world by superimposing virtual information on an image of your surroundings. The new software, called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA), is designed to identify objects viewed on the screen of a camera phone.

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Parsons: Serious Games Prototypes As A Force For Social Good

Serious Games challenging us to play in the public interest

Via: Crain's New York Business.com - Parsons Launching Serious Games Research Lab

Gaming as an education tool is attracting attention from an increasing number of higher education institutions, including Boston College, Columbia University, and Amherst College, which are supporting an online educational game environment called Immersive Education.

Parsons The New School for Design and nonprofit Games for Change announced yesterday they are launching a new research laboratory for Serious Games called PETLab.

The lab, built with a $450,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, will be the first of its kind to develop prototypes for games in the public interest.

The games will be used in pre-kindergarten through grade 12, as well as higher education worldwide, as learning tools and to explore social issues among students.

Private companies and non-profits will sponsor development of games. Microsoft is already working with Parsons to develop Xbox on Campus, a game designer kit that will teach students about game design and social issues.

MTV is also working with PETLab to create a curriculum for online game and development for teenagers that will be distributed through MTV.com’s “MTV Think” portal.

“PETLab marks a new level of interaction with the growing number of companies and nonprofit organizations who are interested in developing games that serve as a catalyst for learning and civic engagement,” says Colleen Macklin, Parsons’ chair of communication design and director of the new PETLab.

The New Face of Parsons

Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, designed by Lyn Rice Architects, is set to open in 2008.

Funded in part by a $7 million donation from philanthropist and New School trustee Sheila C. Johnson, the 25,000-square-foot complex will create a new public face for the school at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 13th Street.

The center will house an innovative urban quad, state-of-the-art galleries, lecture and meeting spaces, a design store, and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Archives, an important collection documenting 20th-century design.

About The New School

The New School is a legendary, progressive university comprising eight schools bound by a common, unusual intent: to prepare and inspire its 9,400 undergraduate and graduate students to bring actual, positive change to the world.

From its Greenwich Village campus, The New School launches economists and actors, fashion designers and urban planners, dancers and anthropologists, orchestra conductors, filmmakers, political scientists, organizational experts, jazz musicians, scholars, psychologists, historians, journalists, and above all, world citizens-individuals whose ideas and innovations forge new paths of progress in the arts, design, humanities, public policy, and the social sciences.

In addition to its 70 graduate and undergraduate degree-granting programs, the university offers certificate programs and more than 1,000 continuing education courses to 13,000 adult learners every year.



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DigitalBrix: When Game Creation Becomes a Serious Game

Serious Games democratizing game creation

Via: Educational Games Research - Making Games With GameBrix

Building a game typically requires a combination of skills. Artists create the characters in the game, animators bring life to the characters, musicians add sound, and programmers provide the game logic.

DigitalBrix enables people to collaborate, build, share, publish and play games online, providing a whole set of encapsulated behaviors that can be used by individuals with no programming skills to build interactive games.

DigitalBrix's products include GBoss and GameBrix.

Gboss is a Web 2.0 hosted solution for building games online. GBoss (an acronym for Game Boss) has been specially designed for people with no programming skills in mind. It is a browser based application that runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and any other platform that supports Internet connectivity with a browser. There are no installs, no upgrades, no CD. And students can work wherever there is Internet connectivity!

GBoss is an intuitive application that allows user created art, animation and music to be incorporated in games.

Used in conjunction with GameBrix, it provides a collaborative environment where users with diverse skills and interests in different locations can work together.

For aspiring online game makers a brand new community is now in public beta providing tools for creating games and animations; forums for sharing ideas, game components, and troubleshooting tips; and a host site for games that others can play.

The target users include creative professionals, casual game enthusiasts, novice game developers looking to break into the gaming world and folks who want to build simple funky games - a community of like-minded players, where budding programmers can seek out the advice and expertise of veteran code-meisters and seek out solutions from all. Folks can work solo, or in teams to produce quality games that can be loaded from the site and played anywhere.

The pedagogical possibilities are readily evident. Professors and teachers can appropriate the site for educational purposes, designing educational games or having students design things themselves.

GameBrix lets kids become game authors and even form their own virtual game studios, recruiting friends to design, build, test, and share 2-D video games.

It’s increasingly common for college computer-science departments to offer courses in advanced video game development to 18-to-24-year-olds who were weaned on Nintendo and PlayStation.

DigitalBrix has a more democratic aim: to enable younger students who might otherwise simply be consuming games or watching television to put their talents to work in a medium that’s inherently interactive and social.

About DigitalBrix

DigitalBrix was founded and incorporated in January 2006.

It's founders have in-depth expertise, commitment and dedication to game design and game programming. They have taught thousands of participants the process of game development over the last five years. They have authored a book on Basic Game Design that breaks down the steps in game design into fun and enjoyable tasks!

DigitalBrix intends to democratize game creation using a browser-based platform independent gaming engine. Using Web2.0 technologies, our products give you the look and feel of a desktop application that are actually Internet hosted applications. They enable creative professionals to graduate to game developers.



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Serious Games Expanding The Creative Story Telling Art

Extreme AI Making Film 2 Game A Serious Business

Via: Extreme AI - Film2Game

Extreme AI, Inc. is an Albuquerque based digital media and entertainment publisher.

Founded in 2003 as a video game studio focusing on mobile and handheld games, in 2005 Extreme AI expanded its focus to include games and media based on Hollywood film productions.

This effort, operating under the Film2Game moniker, strives to create competitive video game offerings matched with mainstream, independent, and lower budget films.

Through the Film2Game initiative, Extreme AI is working with film makers and entertainment industry professionals both locally and nationally to design and develop film-based games.

In addition, they have now partnered with numerous independent art and development studios to offer a powerful array of entertainment options across a variety of media and platforms.

Film2Game vision is to create a medium through which game developers and film makers can work together to extend the reach of film productions and expand the creative story telling art to a broad array of viewers/players.

How It Works

Extreme AI works with film makers around the country who are interested in creating video game content related to a film.

Game developers registered with the Film2Game program are periodically asked to submit bids/proposals for a game based on a film. They use game developers working with a variety of platforms, from mobile to Flash to PC to MMOG. After proposals have been submitted and reviewed by Extreme AI, it offers an array of options to the film maker. Once an agreement is reached, Extreme AI works with all parties involved to produce and publish the game.

Developers, may send an email to billk@extremeai.com expressing their interest in participating in the proposal bidding process, and eventually submit samples of past work.

Footnote

GamerVision has just published a top ten movie tie-in games list, what it considers "quality games that compliments and enhances the movie experience."

Among them:

- Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360, Gamecube, PC)

- Spider-Man 2 (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube)

- Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, PC)

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More On Values@Play: Embodying Values in Serious Games Design

Serious Games bringing values into the process of design

Via: Values At Play - Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice

Following my prior post Values@Play: Designing Social Values in Serious Games, I came across some great material associated with VAP research and resources, available at http://valuesatplay.org/research-resources as downloadable documents.

Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice by Mary Flanagan - Hunter College, Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum -New York University, addresses the practical challenges faced by design and engineering projects to incorporate contextual knowledge about values.

According to the document, one reason the study of human and social dimensions of technology is so demanding is that the areas of knowledge and the methodologies it straddles are traditionally both far-flung and self-contained.

This separation is reflected in the disciplinary organization of almost all universities where the study of technology itself, through the basic sciences and engineering, is typically segregated from the study of social science and humanities.

When undertaking the practical task of developing technologies with attention to values, however, designers must engage simultaneously with these distinct areas of knowledge and their respective methodologies. For this task, their intellectual distinctiveness and historical separation is problematic.

The paper also offers a methodological framework for systematically bringing values into the process of design (Part Two).

The authors illustrate key elements of the methodology by applying it to RAPUNSEL, a multiplayer game environment to promote interest and competence in computer programming among middle-school aged girls, including girls from disadvantaged home environments ( http://www.rapunsel.org/).

This, three-year research project includes a variety of interlinked components: engineering, pedagogy, interface, graphics, networking and more.

In addition, the research team includes graduate and undergraduate students in computer science, media studies and other fields who contribute both in design and implementation areas.

In Rapunsel's Manifesto, the authors embrace the responsibility of designing systems which strengthen each child's role in an ever-growing digital environment.

How do the key ingredients of social interactionand computer code combine to create asuccessful programming learning environment?

The RAPUNSEL project team is researching and building a software environment called "PEEPS" to teach programming concepts to kids. Someday, it will be a multiuser game. For now, they are tackling small interactive modules.

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Correcting A Factual Error On My Recent Post: Brain-Health-Improving Serious Games

Serious Games extending human mental capacity

Alvaro Fernandez, SharpBrains' co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, has kindly brought my attention that my recent post Neuwell: Brain-Health-Improving Serious Games contains a factual error.

Under the topic Neuroscientists Debunk Old Thinking That Brains Decline With Aging, where it reads "during the last year Science Lore has interviewed 11 cutting-edge neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists on their research and thoughts", it was Alvaro Fernandez who in fact interviewed all of them.

Correction made! Many thanks, Alvaro.

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Values@Play: Designing Social Values in Serious Games

Harnessing the power of Serious Games for humanistic principles

Via: Values At Play - Designing Social Values in Computer Games

Aware of the tremendous and wide-ranging impact games have in our world, the Values at Play (VAP) research project seeks to assist and encourage designers in creating games that further the understanding and appreciation of such values as equality, diversity, creativity, and many more.

Values At Play ambition is to harness the power of video games in the service of humanistic principles.

The Values At Play Curriculum And Teaching Guide

The Values at Play project was conceived with the intent of investigating how video game designers consciously and unconsciously embed social values into video games through narratives and game mechanics.

The curriculum, a corollary of the research project funded by a National Science Foundation grant, will introduce designers to a systematic method for discovering, analyzing, and integrating values into their design work.

All of the materials associated with the curriculum are available at http://valuesatplay.org/curriculum as downloadable documents.

The VAP Curriculum at a Glance

This is a 4-week unit that introduces students to the concept of values becoming embedded in games through choices that design teams make about rules, mechanics, and narrative throughout the iterative design process. Following are the major components:

1. An on-line survey that students will complete before the unit begins
2. Readings and class activities that introduce and reinforce the concept of values becoming embedded in games
3. On-line design journals for students to reflect on their experiences
4. A game prototype as a final project for the unit
5. A second on-line survey completed at the end of the unit

GROW-A-GAME - Values At Play Game Contest Open For Submissions

The contest is accepting PLAYABLE GAMES ON ANY PLATFORM from Flash to Java to Board Games made by teams or individuals. Students, artists, activists, and all others are welcome to participate.

Submissions can be made to one of three categories:

Social Impact: Design a game using and issue, value, and mechanic from the list on our website
Community is Revolutionary: Pick a controversy currently under debate in your community and address it with a game
Greenwoods: Build a game that explores economic issues such as consumerism inside a fictional big-box retail store

Winners in each category will receive up to 8 Apple iPhones for the team and international recognition in VAP Games Library, and promotion of their work at the Games for Change 2008 Conference to be held in June 2008 in New York City.
Submissions are due January 1, 2008 at which time judges will begin reviewing entries. Winning games will be archived and promoted by our not-for-profit team.

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Learning From Arden: Serious Games Are Meant To Be Fun!

Serious Games rely on the fundamental features of any videogame

Via: Flux - Learning For Games or Games For Learning?

and Terra Nova - Arden Slows Down, Takes Breather

Arden: The World of William Shakespeare ended a year of development in October, with lots of lessons learnt, mostly that this is very hard to do.

Arden Project's basic objective was to revolutionize social science by introducing controlled experimentation at the macro level.

The game was a project out of Indiana University funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant.

Its creator, Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at the university, wanted to use the world to test economic theories: by manipulating the rules of the game, he hoped to find insights into the way that money works in the real world.

Players can enter the game and explore a town called Ilminster, where they encounter characters from Shakespeare, along with many plots and quotations. They can answer trivia questions to improve their characters and play card games with other players.

Multiverse was used for early production, after which they switched to Neverwinter Nights. The world is hosted on the Teragrid.

Coming from Castronova, a pioneer in the field, the game was expected by many to show the power of virtual-world-based research.

But Castronova says that there’s a problem with the game: “It’s no fun.”

While focusing on including references to the bard, he says, his team ended up sidelining some of the fundamental features of a game. “You need puzzles and monsters,” he says, “or people won’t want to play … Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach.

Castronova has abandoned active development of Arden; he released it last week to the public as is, rather than starting up the experiments he had planned.

Part of the problem: it costs a lot to build a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75 million that he says goes into developing something on the scale of the popular game World of Warcraft. “I was talking to people like it was going to be Shakespeare: World of Warcraft, but the money you need for that is so much more,” he says.

Castronova also says that he was taking on too much by attempting to combine education and research. He believes that his experience should serve as a warning for other academics.




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Neuwell: Brain-Health-Improving Serious Games

Serious Games to extend human mental capacity

Via: Neuwell- Neuroscience For Wellness *

*Japanese site. English site under development

Go Hirano is a serial Japanese entrepreneur who has been exploring neuroscience-based opportunities in Japan, having recently created the company NeuWell (Neuroscience for Wellness).

Neuwell is a Japan based start up that develops training systems to improve and extend human mental capacity.

"It is hardly deniable that brains enchant Japanese people. We love brain training. Dentsu, the biggest advertising agency, announced the No.1 Consumer-chosen 2006 Product was game software and books for brain training", says- Go Hirano, founder of NeuWell.

Key Trends In Japan

- People in Japan devour any product with brain-related claims

- But there has been a recent backlash against children videogames, so game developers have started to focus on older audiences with (mostly unproven) brain-health-improving games

- The market is ripe for programs with proven research and tangible benefits

NeuWell and SharpBrains are exploring opportunities together to bring world-class programs - brain-health improving games - to Japan.

About Go Hirano

Hirano is a skilled executive in the telecommunications industry, and has been a key participant in making Japan one of the fastest growing markets worldwide for broadband usage.

Hirano was one of three founders of Tokyo Metallic Communications, the first company to deliver ADSL service in Japan in 1999. As VP and CEO of technology and operations, he successfully ran negotiations with fixed-line owner NTT, and completed the rollout of service to the entire Tokyo area one year from its first service deployment. Hirano also was instrumental in raising funds in excess of $50M from Japanese domestic and overseas investors.

Hirano remained with the company through the transition after being acquired by Softbank in 2001, growing the business to revenues of over $3 million per month, and creating the business model for what is now YahooBB, the largest DSL provider in Japan. Business partners include NTT communications, KDDI, NTT-East, NTT-West, NTT-PC, NTT-ME, NTT-Comware, NTT-Facilities, Global Crossing, Teleglobe, Nortel, Marubeni, NTV, Ricoh, Kadokawa-shoten, TDK, NEC, and Sumitomo Electronics.

Hirano began his telecommunication career at Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) in 1985, where he was responsible for introducing the first ISDN services to Japan. He also served in several managerial roles in the Planning, Capital Investment, and Multimedia Business Development departments. His responsibilities were varied including the deployment of network management systems, design of network architectures, and the introduction of new services such as the Xephion service now provided by NTT-ME.

Hirano is a graduate of Tokyo University, with both a BA and an MA in Precision Mechanics. He obtained his MBA from San Diego State University, California in 1989 while still an employee of NTT.

Neuroscientists Debunk Old Thinking That Brains Decline With Aging

Neuroscientists have finally debunked that old thinking that our brains decline inexorably after a certain age and that there is little each of us can do to "exercise" and "train our brains".

During the last year Science Lore has interviewed 11cutting-edge neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists on their research and thoughts. Here are some of its favorite quotes:

"Learning is physical. Learning means the modification, growth, and pruning of our neurons, connections–called synapses– and neuronal networks, through experience...When we do so, we are cultivating our own neuronal networks. We become our own gardeners"- Dr. James Zull, Professor of Neurobiology and Biochemistry at Case Western University.

"Exercising our brains systematically is as important as exercising our bodies. In my experience, "Use it or lose it" should really be"Use it and get more of it".- Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, neuropsychologist, clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, and disciple of the great neuropsychologist Alexander Luria.

"What research has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or "cognitive simulations" are the most effective and efficient way to do so." - Dr. Daniel Gopher, Director of the Research Center for Work Safety and Human Engineering at Technion Institute of Science.

"Individuals who lead mentally stimulating lives, through education, occupation and leisure activities, have reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's symptoms. Studies suggest that they have 35-40% less risk of manifesting the disease"- Dr. Yaakov Stern, Division Leader of the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Sergievsky Center at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New York.

"We have shown that working memory can be improved by training...I think that we are seeing the beginning of a new era of computerized training for a wide range of applications" – Dr. Torkel Klingberg, Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Karolinska Institute.

"I don't see that schools are applying the best knowledge of how minds work. Schools should be the best place for applied neuroscience, taking the latest advances in cognitive research and applying it to the job of educating minds." - Dr. Arthur Lavin, Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Case Western School of Medicine, pediatrician in private practice.

"Cognitive training rests on solid premises, and some programs already have very promising research results. Some of the most are promising areas are: neurofeedback, which as a whole is starting to present good research results, and working memory training." - Professor David Rabiner, Senior Research Scientist and the Director of Psychology and Neuroscience Undergraduate Studies at Duke University.



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Serious Games Helping Institutions Visualize Their Solutions

Serious Games and VR quicly spreading in business

Via: daytaOhio - Barco and daytaOhio Equipped Collaborative Visualization Complex at Wright State’s Joshi Research Center

Barco, a leading global provider of visual display systems, has partnered with daytaOhio to implement the industry’s most advanced virtual collaboration and visualization complex at Wright State University’s Joshi Research Center.

This multi-room, network-centric facility marks the first visualization center of its kind in the Ohio Miami Valley.

It is equipped with intelligent presentation systems and large-scale, immersive virtual reality technology for virtual collaboration, analysis, and decision making.

Some of the work done by Wright State researchers will support applied research for members of daytaOhio (the Ohio Wright Center for Data), a non-profit corporation that supports a consortium of organizations, civilian and military, working to resolve the complexities of large-scale data management issues.

“This kind of technology is exactly what we need to stimulate local growth,” said Paul Cashen, President of daytaOhio. “We are very excited about the visualization systems Barco has provided, which will actively help Ohio and the Dayton area to become a competitive player in today’s global market.”

“The Joshi Research Center solution demonstrates what Barco is all about,” said Ken Hunter, director of marketing, virtual & augmented reality for Barco.

“We are about bringing the very latest in virtual technology to the practical level, enhancing education and analysis. Barco’s comprehensive visualization system will enable research teams in a wide variety of disciplines to collaborate locally or remotely, visualize and evaluate data in a more intuitive fashion, and make decisions in real-time.”

Barco Vis - Electricity

Barco Vis - Medicine

Barco Vis - Avionics

Excellent visualization is crucial to the success of the high-end data management and analytics center of daytaOhio housed in the Joshi Center. The visualization facility is equipped with a comprehensive and sophisticated visual system consisting of Barco’s CADWall system, I-Space immersive virtual environment, and network-centric presentation system.

According to Cashen, the broader use of the Internet, advancement of technology/miniaturization and globalization contribute to a glut of data that paralyzes decision-making in organizations.

Virtual Reality Spreading In Business - Technology used to improve design, train workers and configure factories.

daytaOhio President, Paul Cashen, wears 3D glasses along with Ken Berta, back left, and Ken Hunter - director of marketing, virtual & augmented reality for Barco - back right, in the 3D room at the Virtual Reality lab in the Joshi Center at Wright State University.

At the Joshi Research Center, Room 278, a data-crunching, virtual-reality hub, visitors are immersed in a dizzying array of computer-generated 3-D images.

Long a darling of the military, aviation and video-game industries, virtual reality is being embraced by more businesses as the falling cost of computer power makes it more affordable.

Manufacturers of farm equipment, car seats, mufflers and other products have joined automakers and aircraft manufacturers in using the technology to speed up and improve product design, train workers and configure factories and stores.

Ken Hunter holds 3D glasses in the front of the screen at the Virtual Reality lab in the Joshi Center at Wright State University

The $2 million Vis Lab at the Joshi center opened in October at Wright State University just outside Dayton, allowing businesses to outsource virtual-reality work without having to buy the technology themselves.

Companies pay $1,000 a day to use the lab and its high-powered computers.

The floor of the Gulf of Mexico floats in the air there on a screen 8 feet by 14 feet — about the size of a small billboard — awash in the glow of a deep-sea blue. It twists and turns, revealing cracks and fissures. Then it nearly pokes the viewer in the eye — or seems to.

A Houston energy company this year will feed seismic data into the center's computers. The company will sink virtual probes through the virtual crust looking for salt domes that may hold oil deposits. That could give the business an idea of where the oil is — or isn't — and save millions of dollars in drilling costs.

In virtual reality, high-performance computers connected to projectors throw alternating left-eye-right-eye images of a 3-D object on a large screen in a way to create depth. Viewers wear specialized light-polarizing glasses that synchronize the images to complete the 3-D effect.

In immersive visualization, images are projected on all four walls, the ceiling and the floor. As viewers move and turn their heads, the images change to create the illusion of walking or floating.

Farm equipment maker Deere & Co., based in Peoria, Ill., is using virtual reality at the Iowa center and its own labs to test-drive products not yet built and make sure the equipment will be easy to maintain.

"These experiences help identify design problems with products or work environments that traditionally might not have been noticed until prototypes were built," company spokesman Ken Golden said. "Our vision in VR is to have only one physical build of our products before we move into production."

Mechanical simulation — which is used, for example, to predict the crash worthiness of a new car design — is a $1.5 billion business and is growing at 10% to 12% a year, said Marc Halpern, research director at Gartner Inc. He says using virtual reality is less expensive and quicker than building and testing complex prototypes.

Virtual-reality systems gained popularity in the 1980s, but they usually required clunky headsets that produced fuzzy images and a stuttering effect as the computers struggled to spew out the data necessary to create the effect.

Now, advancements in projectors, computer software and graphics cards can produce higher-resolution images, and the computer power needed is cheaper.

Automakers and aircraft makers began using virtual reality and immersive visualization in the early 1990s. The military embraced it at about the same time and has since used it to train pilots and tank operators and to improve the design of aircraft, helmets and uniforms.

Imagery that once required a million-dollar supercomputer can be done with a cluster of desktop computers costing less than $100,000, said Jeff Brum, vice president of development for Fakespace Systems, a Marshalltown, Iowa-based company that sells virtual-reality systems to businesses and researchers.

Monica Schnitger, senior vice president of market analysis for the technology research firm Daratech, said immersive visualization is becoming more widely used by large companies. Prospective owners of power plants and ships have used it to experience what it is like to walk through the control room, for example.

"Simulation of almost any kind usually leads to a better end product, and that's always a good strategic move," Schnitger said.

A nursing institute and a company that handles hazardous materials have expressed interest in using the lab at Wright State for training, said Paul Cashen, president of daytaOhio, the research group that operates it.

Trucking companies are using virtual-reality simulators around the country to train drivers before they take their driving tests.

The virtual cab, which in some cases is attached to a motion platform, enables drivers to practice turning, parking and docking and puts them through driving scenarios in cities, the suburbs and rural areas, said Ron Tarr, a program director at the Institute for Simulation & Training at the University of Central Florida, who has designed applications for the simulators.

Since the technology was rolled out two years ago, more than 450 drivers have used it, at truck depots in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin. In some cases the virtual reality is a little too real. Some drivers get carsick.

Werner Enterprises, an Omaha-based trucking company with 12,000 drivers, sends 30 drivers through a simulator each week to improve their skills. In the simulator, winds blow hard, ice and snow fall, accidents happen and deer run across the highway.

About Joshi Center

The Joshi Center, which opened on October 27, is a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to advanced data management. Funded in part by Ohio Gov. Bob Taft’s Third Frontier Initiative, The Joshi Center houses daytaOhio and several departments of the Wright State School of Engineering

About daytaOhio

daytaOhio is an independent, world-class center for advancing research and commercialization of data intensive information technology. Wright State University is the lead research collaborator daytaOhio has targeted a $50 billion market opportunity and is driving technology job creation, economic development, global market research and world-class commercialization growth models. The State of Ohio provided $12.6 million to establish the organization as part of Gov. Bob Taft’s Third Frontier Project, managed by the Ohio Department of Development. More than 27 industry, academic, government and non-profit partners have pledged more than $32 million in support for the center.

About Barco

Barco, a global technology company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium, designs and develops visualization products for a variety of professional markets. Barco has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

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Military Turned First To Serious Games, Now To Virtual Worlds

Military increasingly making use of virtual worlds for training

Via: The Washington Times - Military Sets Sights On Virtual World

Since 1997, when the Marine Corps used Software Inc.'s popular "Doom" game as the basis for a training tool, agencies have experimented with computer games for serious purposes.

The Serious Games Movement got a start in 2002 when the U.S. Army released the video game America's Army as a free online download. That game was the first successful and well-executed serious game that gained total public awareness. More than 5 million people have become registered users.

The US government and military have turned to the game industry for two reasons: lower costs and improved quality of user experience.

Computer games cost significantly less than a large-scale simulator in which trainees sit in a cockpit, or another life-size system. What's more, games can be deployed cost-effectively online. With simulators, the military must bear the cost of bringing trainees to the simulators.

Games by their nature are competitive, fast moving and entertaining. They also tend to include better and more realistic graphics and games are different every time they're played.

Now, U.S. military and intelligence agencies are increasingly making use of computer-generated virtual worlds for training, teleworking and trying to predict human behavior.

The capabilities of so-called synthetic world software have increased at a huge rate since they were pioneered for the public by such games as "SimCity" and "Second Life." Now, scientists working for the military and U.S. intelligence want to capitalize on that notion.

The U.S. Navy recently announced it was looking for a contractor to develop "a highly interactive, PC-based Human, Social and Culture Behavioral Modeling simulation tool to support training for military planners for handling insurgencies, small wars and/or emergent conflicts."

According to a procurement document posted online, the software "should be game-based" and must be "flexible enough" to allow users to design their own scenarios, maps and "unique situations" as "plug-in modules to experiment and train with."

The Navy project will join a growing list of programs seeking to leverage the power of such complex simulation programs for a variety of purposes.

"There's a real big push in the military for this kind of thing," defense technology analyst and blogger Noah Shachtman told United Press International.

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Serious Games Moving Training Into A Gameplay Environment

Serious Games help bring tacit knowledge to the surface

Via: Next Generation - When Work Becomes A Game

and Boxes and Arrows - The Design Behind The Design

TruSim, formed in 2005, is a division of leading European independent developer Blitz Games that was established to create products that tap the burgeoning Serious Games market.

TruSim is developing prototypes, in conjunction with commercial and specialist partners, as well as leading educational institutions, that aim to demonstrate the potential of Serious Games as engaging visualization and training tools.

“The games industry is naturally broadening its horizons,” says Mary Matthews, strategy and business development director at Blitz Games.

“It’s moving from being a niche entertainment medium into a mass market entertainment medium in the same way that film and TV matured to look at serious subjects.”

Currently TruSim is trialing a proof-of-concept prototype called Triage Trainer. The game is set at the scene of a high-street explosion and designed for use during Major Incident Medical Management and Support (MIMMS) courses. It is being used to train clinicians, medical workers, paramedics and first responders to the scene of a major incident in a process called triage fifth, Mathews explains, which is when people arrive at the scene of an incident and need to prioritize casualties for order of treatment.

A scene from the Triage Serious Game created by TruSim

“Learning through play is, after all, a well established educational concept, and the kind of generation that's now learning is very, very familiar with game play."

The automatic next step is to move training into a game play environment.

"Role play in corporate training is well established, well understood and effective. Role playing in a virtual environment, however, has the advantage of time saving because you don’t have to travel to one meeting place."

Private Virtual Worlds using Forterra's Olive Platform

"You can also role [multi]play online, you can do it time and again, in slightly different scenarios, or using different interfaces, or playing from different perspectives, which you can’t do in a traditional role playing exercise in a corporate environment.”

Legal Games

Serious Games Changing Cultures In Legal Education

Medical Games

University of Florida Project: Medical students to interview DIANA, a virtual patient

Pulse!! The Virtual Clinical Learning Lab created by BreakAway Ltd.

Game-like Activities Help Bring Tacit Knowledge To The Surface

Games create conceptual touchstones—shared references that bridge different points of view and provide a common platform for conversation. That’s what most design deliverables try to do, with varying degrees of success.

Games are participatory. Instead of the design team holing up to produce some artifact for approval, games can involve a broad spectrum of players, and that creates buy-in as well as common ground for conversations. The accessibility of gameplay means that it’s not just a team of specialists involved, and the diversity of viewpoints from a broader group makes for better insight and innovation.

Finally, games tap into different ways of articulating ideas that help bring tacit knowledge to the surface. Tacit knowledge is often the key to successful requirements, and yet design teams often miss the implicit assumptions and elements that people can’t articulate on demand: asking people what they really need is likely to give anything but.

Games can help surface this missing understanding.


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Serious Games Radically Enhancing Spectator Experience At Public Media Events

Serious Games providing access to a rich range of media

Via: Creative Technology Network - 3C Research's Project Visualise Goes To The World Rally Championships in Wales

On 30th November Visualise was at the Wales Rally for the first public trial of the enhanced Visualise system.

Spectators at major events such as motor rallies often miss seeing much of the action, since they can only watch a small part of the course at a time: now wireless technology is coming to their rescue.

A high profile project - known as VISUALISE - put wireless multimedia into the hands of spectators at the Wales Rally . The system allows spectators with PDA's to watch video coming live from cameras mounted in the rally cars as they race around the course.

Getting a high quality video signal live from rally cars moving at speed over hilly terrain is a challenge; getting that video back out to spectators scattered around the course is equally difficult.

Visualise provides a new service comprising live local video feeds, remote feeds from the Swansea Service Area, World Rally Championship statistics and results, and archive material, together with Team, Driver and Stage information, in the hospitality area at Walters Arena in the Rheola 2 stage at Wales Rally GB.

Spectators access this service using wireless handheld devices connecting via wireless hotspots. The Visualise information is also displayed on a large screen at the event and is available interactively online to selected users.

Visualise - The Opportunity

Spectators at many large-scale live events have a relatively poor experience, due to their location and the lack of personalized content, compared to armchair spectators who watch television or webcast coverage at home.

Large-scale public events are now common-place.

Examples include, motor sport (World Rally Competition, Formula 1), athletics competitions (Olympics), rock festivals (Glastonbury) and golf competitions (Open).

Typically such events deploy a huge infrastructure of production and transmission equipment with many fixed and portable cameras. Most of the content is never made available to local spectators except through a single feed of edited output to portable TVs or large screen displays.

VISUALISE aims to provide an enhanced experience for spectators at events through local area access to a rich range of media via hand-held devices. This will include non-viewable (temporal or spatial) events or locations, archive material and statistics.

For example, spectators at Formula 1 would be able to experience all key events (overtaking, pit stops, crashes, action replays) even when these occurred out of sight and would also be able to follow a team or individual's performance.

Visualise – Deliverables

Visualise has innovated in a number of technical areas essential for delivering this service in a cost-effective and scalable way, including:

· Video compression and streaming technology for use with wireless broadband networks in difficult environments.
· The integration of fixed (service park and trackside) and mobile (in-car) cameras into a live-viewing infrastructure.
· Rapid planning and deployment of networks through the exploitation of advanced propagation modeling tools.
· Enhanced user interactivity through PDAs and mobile phones
· Content management, distribution and integration with the existing broadcast infrastructure.
· A demonstrator hosted by ISC (International Sportsworld Communicators) at the UK stages of the 2006 and 2007 World Rally Championship.

About 3C Research

3C Research supports collaborative research projects involving universities and commercial organizations, both large and small, in the fields of digital media and communications.

3CR creates an environment where a wide variety of industry players come together to share their perspectives and skills in order to understand emerging markets and to create and realize new solutions.

Partners in the VISUALISE project, which is supported by the DTI Technology Programme, are Provision Communications, Turner Broadcasting, BT, Node, Inmarsat, U4EA Technologies, Util4, and the University of Bristol.

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Forterra Makes Serious Games More Accessible To All

Forterra's Olive making it easier to create and deploy Serious Games

Virtual Meeting and Presentation

Via: Forterra Today's Press Release - Company Offers Three Separate Options to Support All Stages of the Application Development Lifecycle

Forterra Systems, a major player in private virtual worlds, announced today the launch of the Company’s Developer Programs designed to make it easy for consultants, system integrators, value-added resellers, Independent Software Vendors, technology partners, education institutions, and business organizations to create, integrate, and deploy 3D applications using Forterra’s OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) software platform.

In addition Forterra has altered its price model to be less expensive for a production deployment with small numbers of users.

“The 3D Internet is a disruptive force of change that is transforming how businesses, the public sector, and educational institutions train, research, practice, and collaborate,” said Dave Rolston, Forterra’s CEO. “Our Developer Programs and new pricing allow our customers and partners to participate in this powerful market trend more easily through the creation, delivery, and marketing of 3D content, value-add plug-ins, and complete applications based on the OLIVE platform.

The Developer Programs are designed to provide cost effective means to develop and pilot a 3D application, and to accelerate time-to-production. Our goal is to create a vibrant partner ecosystem and marketplace of industry specific, serious virtual world solutions that benefit our customers, and provide new revenue and profit streams for our partners.”

One of the early development partners working with Forterra is Vcom3D, a leader in providing multilingual, culture-specific, virtual communicator characters for situation-based learning. “Forterra has been an excellent partner, in particular, providing support and guidance for the integration of our Vcommunicator products which extend the capabilities of the OLIVE platform,” indicated Carol Wideman, Vcom3D CEO. “Customers will benefit from access to our authoring tools and international library of cultural specific gestures for creating and easily modifying compelling, realistic training scenarios. OLIVE’s modular architecture enables us to support customer requirements for massively multiplayer training used to practice non-kinetic operations.”

The Forterra Developer Programs are structured to deliver higher levels of support services and benefits based on varying levels of investment and relationship with Forterra. Tools and resources available through the Developer Programs include: education, developer services, technical support, hosting, account management, and marketing. Forterra has invested heavily in support, training, and documentation services to provide the assistance needed for its customers and partners to achieve success by tapping the power of the 3D Internet.

Forterra offers three different Developer Programs to provide the means to get trained, develop, test, demo, prototype and pilot a 3D application with stake-holders before a production deployment. All three of Forterra’s Developer Programs (Basic, Standard, and Premium) include a non-production Developer license of OLIVE that works over a LAN, WAN, and the Internet. A variety of 3D content from existing content packs are included. There is an option for Forterra to host the development server.

• Basic is the entry level developer program targeting corporations pursuing a proof of concept, startups with minimal budget, higher education research groups, or small developers and VARs. This affordable program is designed to provide the basic support assistance to help an organization reach its design goals within six months before pursuing a production license of OLIVE.

• Standard is Forterra’s main developer program for corporations, value-added resellers, system integrators, and education organizations. This program provides core training, success guidance, and developer services to help an organization reach its design goals within six months before pursuing a production license of OLIVE.

• Premium is the top-of-the-line developer program targeting global system integrators creating 3D OLIVE applications as an on-going business practice. This program provides the highest level of developer assistance throughout the year. Account management services are bundled with this program to ensure Forterra is aligned with and proactively assisting integrators to execute business goals as a trusted business partner.

For additional information on Forterra’s Developer Programs, visit: http://www.forterrainc.com/

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Serious Games Sessions Europe: Real Time Universe Simulator

Serious Games - a faster learning interface

Via: La Fabrike Interactive Blog - Serious Games Session : Climatus Alpha1

The 3rd Serious Games Sessions Europe, was held on 3 December 2007 in Lyon, France, Cité Centre des Congrès, with the value proposition of understanding Serious Games in three steps: applications aimed at innovation, tools aimed at action and and environment with huge great potential, with a forecast turnover of US$10 billion in the United States in 2008 for e-learning alone, according to the Financial Times.

The seven themes addressed at the conference were Training-Education, Health, Science and Research, Private Companies, Administration and Public Authorities, Defence and Civil Security.

The session Climatus and Microsim Support Learning University, presented by Christophe Batier from the University of Lyon 1, introduced Climatus.

Climatus is a real-time universe simulator, where the user conceives one or more planets, and can see their evolution over time.

Game Principle

Three different views are proposed: a galaxy view, a solar system view, and a field view.

The planets have a life cycle defined by the hosting galaxy: from 2 hours to 3 months.

The planets are built by the player, who can define a number of parameters specific to the planet (composition, distance, density, mass,...).

The player can interact with the planet by introducing a series of phenomena more or less risky ((hush of asteroids, volcanoes, etc.). This risk-taking allows users to earn points, which they can then spend in other phenomena.

Players can also communicate with other connected players

Climatus allows, via experimentation, sensitivities of the creation and evolution mechanisms of the universe.

Ultimately, the player must chose an objective e.g. creating a planet with the 3 H2O phases or not exceeding a given temperature for the planet life period".

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GDC08: Newly Expanded Summits Broaden Serious Games Coverage

Two out of six focused summits at GDC08 are Serious Games related

Via: Worlds In Motion - GDC 2008 Debuts Summit Speaker Details

Game Developers Conference, the major industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of interactive entertainment, has revealed session details for its newly-expanded lineup of single-track summits that take a closer look at the industry’s emerging trends.

GDC08 most appealing “new face” is a direct result of GDC being actively adapting their previously tutorial-oriented pre-conference schedule to feature pioneering developers in highly targeted summits.

By integrating each of these emerging micro communities into the curriculum, the GDC is well-positioned to remain the central hub of information and business for the entire game industry.

The summits will be happening over the first two days of the conference.

Information on the content for the Casual Games Summit, the Independent Games Summit, the Serious Games Summit and, new for 2008, the Game Outsourcing Summit, the Worlds in Motion Summit, and the IGDA Education Summit is now available online at the GDC 2008 Summits webpage.

Two out of six focused summits at GDC08, designed to foster and facilitate community-building within emerging influential sectors of the game industry, are Serious Games related:

The returning Serious Games Summit continues to lead the dialogue for the rapidly-growing sector that features use of interactive games technology for non-entertainment purposes.

One highlight of this year’s summit finds Ben Sawyer of DigitalMill and Peter Smith of the University of Florida presenting “Serious Games Taxonomy,” aiming to develop a stronger definition of the entire field of serious games, including categorization and specific labeling within the large gamut of activity.

Another session highlight spotlights Robert J. Stone of Human Factors Integration Defense Technology Center, Stephane de Buttet of Agence Rhône-Alpes Numérique - Lyon Game, and Jim Parker from University of Calgary/CPSC presenting their "Serious Game World Report".

The Worlds in Motion Summit, launching at GDC08, will explore the cross section between gaming and interactive networking tools like online worlds, player-generated content, social networking and general personalization.

Highlights include SOE veteran, Areae co-founder and noted industry figure Raph Koster discussing the ways virtual worlds are increasingly relevant to the ways we play, and a discussion with Relic Labs’ Adrian Crook on the free-to-play business model and how it is evolving the face of online play.



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