The US Army has announced a $50 million investment over five years to develop video game training systems to prepare soldiers for combat.
Not playing around: Army to invest $50M in combat training games
The “games for training” program will start in 2010. Jump to the above link to read all about this new initiative in the Stars and Stripes online edition.
Categories: Education · Virtual Worlds
Well, that was a short run. Today Google announced that they are pulling the plug on Lively.
The free private virtual world platform went into beta last July. It showed some promise, and after a discussion with one of the project team I had some hope that they were going to enhance it for education. The big add that needed to be made was voice support. Any virtual platform that even wants to think about being taken up by education needs to have full voice support at an absolute minimum, and should have some kind of video support for streaming and live broadcast. Google Lively had neither.
Very soon after the launch of the beta Lively rooms started popping up in violation of the terms of service and community standards with adult themes and content. When these rooms started landing at the top of the popular rooms list, users started getting offended and making complaints. This combined with the fairly limited avatar interactions most likely lead to the demise of this Google offering. This just goes to show that it takes more than a big company or slick graphics to make a virtual platform successful.
Categories: Virtual Worlds
There’s a whole batch of new videos up at the Wonderland site. Nicole Yankelovich, Project Lead, has a great Community Showcase video up at the site. Jordan Slott has an overview of the new Wonderland v0.4. Joe Provino has a video on the Audio Features in V0.4. Deron Johnson has a video on Shared Applications in v0.4. Nigel Simpson has a video on Collaboration – Aware Applications. Paul Vyrne has an Overview of the upcoming v0.5. And Doug Twilleager has a video on the updated graphics and Avatars in v0.5.
Categories: Wonderland
You knew it had to happen somewhere. Interesting that China is the first to adopt taxes on virtual transactions. The Wall Street Journal China Edition has a story up on this:
Real Taxes for Real Money Made by Online Game Players
From the article:
“The State Administration of Taxation said on its Web site Wednesday (in Chinese) that China will impose a personal income tax of 20% on profit from virtual money. The announcement, which was distributed to local tax bureaus, specifically takes aim at those who buy virtual currency from gamers and surfers and sell it to others at a mark-up. Taxation officials are granted the right to determine the original price of online virtual currency if the individual fails to provide proof of an original price, it says.”
20% seems like an excessive tax on virtual transactions. It will be interesting to see if other countries follow suit now that one has taken the plunge in this type of taxation. And where does it stop? Right now it “appears” that this tax is on real money exchanges of virtual currencies. How long until we have a tax on virtual assets and property by some country?
Categories: Virtual Worlds
I posted a blog entry over at the PacRimX blog about my first viewing Adina’s Deck last December. This first student focused half hour film was in the tradition of the ‘After School Specials‘ of my youth. Each episode covers an important issue for technology savvy teens. The creators of this series wanted to focus on girls (which was expanded in episodes two and three). Episode one was about cyber bullying.
I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of all three episodes (the year old episode one, and the first showings of episodes two and three) in this series week before last. The premiere was right here in Modesto, California at the State Theater. The event was attended by many of the actors and actresses that appeared in the films along with the two responsible for the films; Debbie Heimowitz and Jason Aziocri.
The two new episodes focused on other important topics related to student use of the Internet. Episode Two focused on online dating and predators. Episode Three was on the issues surrounding plagiarism. Both were of equal, if not higher, production value as the first one in the Adina’s Deck series.
After the showing they had the student actors up on stage for a roundtable discussion about the series and the issues presented. It was apparent from this that there was not much discussion or planning prior to the premiere and the discussion was a bit light on the issues.
I went into this premiere thinking that these videos might be good for 8th – 11th grade audiences. I think I’ve adjusted that down to 7th – 9th grades. I took my family and asked my 16 year old triplet boys their opinion after the show and they confirmed my impression on who the target audience might be.
I did not have a chance to talk to Debbie or Jason after the show. I am curious if there are plans to license these videos to schools for streaming to their classrooms internally to the district network. I am not interested in buying a bunch of DVD’s, as they would likely be lost very quickly.
If I find out about pricing plans or options for schools I will make another post on this. In the meantime, you can get more info at the official Adina’s Deck website. You can also see some trailers and other videos posted to Debbie Heimowitz’s YouTube page.
Categories: Education
