Link: The Wilderness Downtown

From the Yesha VW Blog, a machinma generation software page for an Arcade Fire song.

It is pure emotional manipulation, using images of your home town as a way to engage with the song in a deeper manner. Found it quite wistful to see the large St Killian's Clapboard Church from my hometown of Bendigo, Victoria, Australia.

However, putting aside my cynical attitude to being manipulated by an Emo band, this approach could be used in an exceedingly powerful manner for visualisation and communication. Imagine a Green Party political campaign with images of YOUR home town damaged by global warming.

Another example of Minority Report style location aware advertising I guess. :-)

Ross

CFP: 1st Global Conference Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds

1st Global Conference Experiential Learning in
Virtual Worlds

Sunday 20th March - Tuesday 22nd March 2011
Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Papers
The advent of Information and Communication
Technologies has changed how we work, teach,
learn, and relate to each other. The idea of a
virtual world encompasses online communities,
communities of inquiry, formal teaching and
learning, and horror and fantasy games. The
experiences gained in such virtual worlds, whether
high or low tech, impact who we
are in the analog world (and vice versa): Who am
I? How do we relate to each other? What is my
role? How can we be productive as a team? What is
mortality? How do we resolve conflict? These
questions are addressed, to some degree, through
the experiences we have in virtual worlds. What
are we learning through those experiences? How can
we perform better in both worlds?

The aim of this conference will be to examine
formal and informal learning in virtual worlds in
an attempt to critique both its essential
characteristics and its future possibilities.
Teachers of all levels, university faculty,
virtual world players, researchers, and others
interested in what happens in virtual worlds and
what it means for us as humans are invited to
participate.

Being such a broad topic, Experiential Learning in
Virtual Worlds defies a definitive list of
sub-topics but the following list is indicative of
the envisaged topics covered within this Call for
Papers:

* Virtual and global teams
* Communication modes and etiquette
* Skill development in MMORPGs
* Online communities, formal and informal
* Case studies of experimental projects
* Understanding mortality in the virtual worlds
* Sexuality: appropriate behaviour in virtual
learning worlds
* Play, fun, fantasy and horror in the
virtual world
* Art of building a virtual persona
* Emerging technologies within Higher Education
* International technology challenges
* Blended Learning approaches
* Expectations of performance in virtual spaces
* Metrics and assessment in virtual worlds
* New forms of testing in virtual worlds
* Organizational issues/strategies in Virtual
education
* Professional development/support structures
* Role switching between traditional and
virtual organizations

Papers will be considered on any related theme.
The Steering Group also welcomes the submission of
pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will be
considered on any related theme.

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday
1st October 2010. All submissions are minimally
double blind peer reviewed where appropriate.
If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a
full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 4th
February 2011. Abstracts should be submitted
simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts
may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with
the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d)
title of abstract, e) body of abstract

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain
from using footnotes and any special formatting,
characters or emphasis (such as bold,
italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and
answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do
not receive a reply from us in a week you
should assume we did not receive your proposal; it
might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to
look for an alternative electronic
route or resend. If an abstract is accepted for
the conference, a 12-20 page full draft paper
should be submitted to both Organising Chairs by
Monday 7th February 2011.

Organising Chairs

Peter Williams
Assistant Professor Organizational Leadership
University of La Verne
La Verne, California, USA
E-mail: pwilliams@stlearn.com

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
United Kingdom
E-mail: elvw@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the 'At the Interface'
programme of research projects. It aims to bring
together people from different areas and
interests to share ideas and explore various
discussions which are innovative and exciting.

All papers accepted for and presented at this
conference will be eligible for publication in an
ISBN eBook. Selected papers maybe invited
for development for publication in a themed hard
copy volume(s).

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/education/experiential-learning-in-virtual-worlds/

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/education/experiential-learning-in-virtual-worlds/call-for-papers/

Video: World Game Layer

Have received the latest TED feed, with a video by Seth Priebatsch (Princeton Dropout of course :-) ) on the use of Games as a motivation and behaviour change approach. Seth, offers some great insights into the motivational nature of gameplay, and how it can be used to possibly engage people in tasks, at the level of even controlling their activities.

Thoughts of Government Mind Control via games aside, this is a powerful idea. People spend hours playing games, days even. Tasks in these virtual spaces offers emotional rewards that strongly engage otherwise apathetic people. Which leads me to think that there is something in this space for motivating people in uptake of new processes via a gaming methodology. New ways of doing things in an organisation are often resisted due to our psychological makeup - this resistance gives us a sense of stability and control. However, this stability prevents good change from occurring. Apropos of nothing, could we use such game play ideas to motivate people in their work, and in other civic areas. This is not a new idea, but this use of gameplay for motivation has great potential.

Ross

Presentation: GAME ON PUBLIC PROGRAM

GAME ON PUBLIC PROGRAM
WHERE: the Glasshouse, Creative Industries Precinct, Musk Av, KG
WHEN: Wednesday September 1st 6.00-7.00pm

Delivering your Game - elsewhere

The game is perhaps fast becoming THE contemporary medium. As new innovators move into making games, a plethora of new outcomes are appearing - art games, docu-games, games for health, serious games, cultural games and interactive visualisations for all sorts of research outcomes. This talk introduces you to some of the other funding opportunities out there and gives you hints on reframing your concepts to suit

Speaker: Fee Plumley, Digital Program Officer, Australia COuncil for the Arts

Fee is a techno-evangelist working across the Major Performing Arts sector through the Arts Organisations Division and all artforms through the Arts Funding Division.

Supported by:
Brisbane IGDA
CIP Precincts
iCi - Inst for Creative Industries & Innovation Griffith Universtiy QCA Qantm College, Brisbane Southbank Institute of Technology

Connect:

IGDA Brisbane website: http://igdabrisbane.org/ IGDA brisbane twitter: http://twitter.com/igdaBrisbane Facebook Group for news and events etc:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=319387216329

Don't forget to join us online for the fabulous 48hr:
http://www.48hrgamecomp.com/

Info: CRC Smart Services PhD Scholarship

For those wanting to study for a PhD with us at QUT, you should consider applying for the CRC Smart Services PhD Scholarship.

We are updating the CRC Smart Services scholarship web page and project topics for the approaching QUT scholarship round. Some possible BPMVE projects are listed in the following link:

http://www.scitech.qut.edu.au/research/scholarships/crcsmartserv/bpmve.jsp

The CRC Smart Services scholarship will be run with the QUT annual scholarship round.

The timeline is:

• 30 August 2010 - applications open
• 30 September 2010 - applications close for new international students
• 15 October 2010 - applications close for all domestic and international students who are currently enrolled in a research higher degree
• 10 December 2010 - offers sent to successful applicants

Email me on the address at the right hand side of this blog for further information. Please send me a CV with your certified grades on it for me to assess. Only students with high grades should apply.

Ross

Link: Medical Students Engaged by Virtual Environments

Via Cranial Tap Inc, recent medical education study showing a strong interest in using Virtual Environments. From the results summary of the paper - "A majority (77%) would use a multiplayer online healthcare simulation on their own time, provided that it helped them to accomplish an important goal."

The evidence is gradually mounting that virtual worlds can encourage high levels of engagement from students, especially due to their experiences with modern online game environments. I think it is not unreasonable to say that such virtual worlds will produce a similar effect within business process training, and in wider community engagement.

Ross

Video: Virtual World Web Technologies

Video here from Damon Hernandez' youtube channel, showing a demo site he built using web based virtual world technologies such as HTML5. An Augmented Reality window is included to show a complete set of web-based test applications in various virtual interaction modalities.

A key driver for uptake of software applications is the ease of use. Using HTML5, WebGL, X3D, and X3Dom technologies will assist in widespread deployment of applications for easy access by clients.

Although I do remember people saying this a few years ago about VRML as well. :-)

Ross