Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it.

Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more.

Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds

The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Felicia Day, Jeff Lewis and Sandeep Parikh, three multi-talented stars of hit Web sitcom, The Guild are to appear in Second Life tomorrow evening as guests on Mitch Wagner's popular podcast, Copper Robot. The hit series, The Guild, has charmed a huge audience with its witty sitcom tale of misfits who all represent a guild in a mythical online game.

Rissa Maidstone, COO of Words2Worlds Inc, has prepared avatars for the guests that combine their MMO personas with their atomic appearance. Above you'll see Codex Alchemi, Codex's alter ego. All three will appear in Second Life for the recording of Copper Robot at 6PM US Pacific Time, tomorrow (Sunday 5 April) at the Seaside Theater on World2Worlds Island.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Felicia Day, Lewis and Parikh to appear in Second Life tomorrow originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A number of sources have been talking about Second Life avatars getting their own phone number for voice calls. First hinted at in a discussion between Information Week writer Mitch Wagner, and Linden Lab's VP for Platform and Technology, Joe Miller, by far the best information on the topic at the moment seems to be available from Expletive Deleted.

E.D. spoke with Miller and got some more details. The goal, it would seem, is PSTN numbers for either groups or avatars with some sort of access PIN to prevent wholesale misuse -- and it looks like some elements of that may already be getting closer.

Continue reading Reach out and touch someone: Avatars by PSTN

Reach out and touch someone: Avatars by PSTN originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.