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Posts Tagged ‘virtual reality’

Proceeds from the sale will fund Jacobs’ virtual planet-building ventures, which could in turn create actual revenue streams for Hollywood, the recording industry and traditional media sources. Really.

“Club Neverdie” is one of the hottest virtual properties in the Entropia Universe, the first virtual world with a real cash economy. An asteroid around Planet Calypso, Entropia’s first planet, is the club’s home. Jacobs bought the asteroid in 2005 for $100,000, after taking out a mortgage on his real-life house, according to Forbes.

Since then, Club Neverdie became a haven for other players visiting its bio-domes, nightclub, stadium and mall. Jacobs was making around $200,000 in actual cash every year from players purchasing virtual goods and services, Forbes explains.

That kind of profit helps justify the club’s selling price — as long as Entropia users keep spending money on virtual goods, the buyers will earn it back in short order. If Farmville’s popularity is any indication, virtual transactions settled with real dollars aren’t going away anytime soon.

In the recent sale, Jacobs sold off Club Neverdie in chunks, the largest of which went to an avatar named John Foma Kalun, who paid $335,000. Forbes says it might be the largest virtual transaction ever, beating the previous record set by Erik “Buzz” Lightyear, an Entropia resident who bought The Crystal Palace Space Station for $330,000 in 2009.

Jacobs’ story is the type you couldn’t make up if you tried. He’s the son of a former Miss United Kingdom and a British financier named “Mr. X;” he's a struggling actor and independent filmmaker; and his office is in Hollywood’s famous El Capitan Theatre building. Dude even has his own theme song.

He is working on a new virtual planet called Rocktropia, where players can listen to live virtual concerts or go on music-related quests, Forbes says. Jacobs is confident virtual worlds will become mainstream: “What typically happens with a new medium is that pop culture has to embrace it before it loses its real stigma of being narrow," he said.

The prospect of half a million dollars in pure profit certainly won't hurt.

[Forbes.com]

An experimental new video game controller just revealed at this week’s SIGGRAPH conference includes a pair of thermoelectric panels on each side of a controller. Those surfaces heat or cool rapidly in reflection of what’s happening in the game, offering players a new sensory connection to what’s happening on the screen.

The controller temperature doesn’t swing wildly – less than 10 degrees in either direction in just five seconds – but apparently a small sensation is all that’s needed to add a rich layer of sensory experience to a virtual reality environment. No word on whether any major console makers are eyeballing such technology, but the idea is pretty cool. After all, remember how thrilling it was when our gaming peripherals started vibrating?

[Technology Review]

Tired of seeing 3-D renderings of objects on your screen and being unable to grab and fondle them? Just slip your fingers into the firm grip of Japanese haptics robot HIRO III. Driven by 15 independent motors, its black phalanges provide real-time force feedback to your hand, precisely simulating the weight and contour of virtual 3-D objects -- a pretty wild paradigmatic leap forward in interface technology!

In this video, a woman watches a 3-D shape on a screen, then gropes and explores it with the help of HIRO III. As the screen displays a virtual hand gripping the spinning polyhedron, the woman's fingertips, each clipped to one of the robot's fingers, vibrate with the movement of the virtual object.

HIRO III was developed at Japan's Gifu University, where the laboratory is currently working towards putting the haptic technology to work in manual screenings for breast cancer. While the system obviously has great potential for use in telemedicine, myriads of other uses -- gaming, for instance -- come to mind as well.

[Diginfo via Gizmodo]

The $500,000 CAREN -- the Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment -- consists of a treadmill, a massive curved screen, and various projectors and cameras that allow the subject six degrees of freedom in moving about his virtual environment. For those learning to use an artificial limb or recovering from a brain injury, that means the ability to relearn how to drive, walk, or navigate an environment from the safety of the hospital.

For those with PTSD or other mental disorders brought on by combat, it means a safe, controlled environment in which service members can slowly reacquaint themselves with the traumatic combat experiences at the root of their disorders. Doctors think this could greatly speed up recovery times and help severely affected patients bring their lives back to normal.

Given the fact that the rate of PTSD in servicemen and women who serve back-to-back tours -- and that's a lot of them these days -- is tremendously high, advanced treatments like CAREN are a top priority for military medical personnel. Such treatment can help them get back in the field with their units or reintegrate them into life minus the war zone.

[Armed With Science, CBC]