Virtual reality has evolved dramatically since its birth. With countless features and interactive options, virtual reality is the face of the future. Therefore we are proud to feature some of the most amazing virtual news and upcoming attractions in our article for Virtual Worlds. Enjoy!

THE BUMPTOP EXPERIENCE IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here! The awesome reinvention of the Desktop in 3D with cool Social Site Integration - The BumpTop has arrived.

Fact is; the desktop has not seen any major innovation in a while. It’s still the same lines of icons on a 2D area. Neither the Mac OS nor Windows goes as far as BumpTop does to completely reinvent and re-imagine the user experience when it comes to the desktop.

Two years ago, a bright engineer, Anand Agarawala, gave a presentation at the TED conference about a new technology he and a team were working on that showed how they believed the desktop should work. Just like how people use a real desk, they believed that the user should be able to interact with desktop items in 3D, pin up photographs, pile related items into stacks, and more.

RISE OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD
Revenues, trends and investments have been poured in by the millions towards the availability of virtual goods and advertising concepts. Companies like Habbo raked in a whopping $74 Million from such methods by using the interactive features to lure teenagers, which makes up more than half of its profit.

Popular mostly outside of the U.S., Habbo Hotel is a mostly free online virtual world which earned $30 million in revenue in 2006. The site is targeted towards a younger demographic ranging from 13 to 18 year olds (90% of users fall in this range). It is free to register and walk around the hotel, yet users can pay extra for more functionality, club membership and furnishings for their hotel room.

Millions have been spent on investments in 63 Virtual Worlds by related companies in 2008, resulting in an astounding $594 Million! Virtual World Management has now officially become the leading trade media company for the virtual world. The Executive Director for Virtual Worlds Managements quoted:

“Nineteen youth-oriented properties received over $70.47 million over the course of the year. The bulk of that was in Q1 and Q3. As more and more youth worlds came to market over the course of the year, spectators worried that the space was overcrowded. Others have seen it as a sector for opportunity, and it appears as if venture capitalists are still at least somewhat interested.”

While that certainly makes a good investment profit sector, discussions on using this brave new media for enterprises have been ongoing. Second Life Grid featured a detailed article on usage of this media.

Today, hundreds of global organizations, including Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and Northrop Grumman, use the Second Life Grid platform to bring distributed teams together in a shared virtual workspace to collaborate, meet, learn, and prototype new offerings.

Speaking about Second Life, Profy featured an article about a $10 Thousand improvement expenditure for Real Life applications.

Today the team is announcing Linden Prize, a contest with the $10,000 in prize money to be paid to a member or a team of Second Life residents for the most innovative in-world project that will improve real lives outside of the virtual world.

With this interesting approach, business meetings in the corporate world are also venturing into virtual conferences to avoid the hassles of real meetings.

As featured in articles for Cnet News, and Read Write Web, Avatars and the Enterprise Virtual Worlds are proving to be more effective than Web Conferencing.

IMPACT AND EVOLUTION OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD
On the subject of the impact and influence that Virtual Worlds have on society, Mattel’s Barbie Girls, which used this media as its marketing source,amassed 11.2 million sign-ups, most of which are of the fairer sex. According to an article in Giga AOM, it’s now about to launch a subscription option for memberships. This incredible strategy can certainly rake in billions within no time! As such, other deals involving Virtual Worlds from the likes of IBM are fast becoming common knowledge. Here we feature some articles from Read Write Web regarding the global impact of Virtual Worlds and Second Life.

There’s been a lot of speculation - and hype - about using virtual worlds for enterprise learning and collaboration. In January, a Forrester report into the use of virtual worlds in the workplace was analyzed, which claimed that “within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today”. However at that point there seemed to be much work to do before virtual world software became user friendly to the enterprise crowd - “you’ve practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools”, Forrester noted in January.

This year was a rocky one for virtual worlds. They continued to move out of the spotlight as media darlings and found, instead, more taciturn media and struggling communities. Second Life dealt with stagnant numbers and Google decided to pull the plug on Lively .

Now, the shot in the arm for Second Life seems to be as simple as a redesign that emphasizes the benefits of the community to would-be users and encourages them to register to try the service for themselves. Plus, they’ve thrown some Cooliris -like panning interactivity in there for good measure.

 

THE VIRTUAL EVOLUTION COMES TO FACEBOOK
Many social websites will definitely be influenced to use at least a small part of the virtual world media to enhance online response. In an article in All Facebook, we discovered that the web-based virtual world platform of Smallworlds is releasing a Facebook application that is designed to push engagement and media sharing opportunities.

Once you’ve added your SmallWorlds virtual environment on Facebook, you can go on to crate avatars, decorate rooms, play games, watch videos, listen to music and embark on the popular SmallWorlds missions, offering a pretty robust virtual experience that’s akin to the standalone site. There’s also a more social option of making your Facebook profile accessible to others within SmallWorlds, linking the SmallWorlds site with individuals’ Facebook pages in a deeper manner.

 

MOVIE VIRTUAL MAGIC COMING TO LIFE IN REALITY
Hollywood movies have paved the way for creative ideas when it comes to advanced technology. And the virtual world has been used as a concept for countless movies. "Minority Report" was a futuristic sci-fi movie, that involved a revolutionary spatial user interface, that has now been made possible, as seen in this video from Fubiz.

Dubbed g-speak, the mind bending OS combines gestural information, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels, to deliver what the creators call the first major step in a computer interface since 1984. The G-Speak system basically “consists of an off-the-shelf DLP projector and special gloves embedded with reflective beads".

IDEAS FOR THE VIRTUAL WORLD
As society itself begins to shift towards a more interactive future, ideas and preferences are needed more to be fully accustomed to the usage of Virtual World media. Here we have two examples of what this Open Virtual World could be spawned from - Beyond the online boundaries of a Metaverse will be the legends of a counter-culture long forgotten….

The key deliverables of the OpenSource Metaverse Project are a server engine and a client component.

The server engine can be installed, configured and administered by anyone to create their own metaverse, somewhat analogous to an Apache web server for web content. Instead of web pages, a metaverse server will serve up the data and contents of a 3-D virtual world that can be customized by the administrator.

Beyond 2 establishes a foundation for four types of virtual world simulation: Physical, Logical, Cognitive, and Narrative. Beyond specifies an API for the Physical simulation model and provide bases classes and abstractions for the Logical, Cognitive, and Narrative simulations.

 

VARIETIES OF VIRTUAL WORLDS AND OPEN SOURCES
Here we feature some cool open source virtual worlds where custum-made applications can be created by using those sources as a base. Among these are RealExtend, Open Croquet, Qwaq, Project Wonderland and Project Darkstar.

We’ll be on the lookout for even more news and features regarding the Virtual Worlds of the future…