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Parents are even getting into it, the study showed that forty-five percent of parents play video and/or computer games with their children at least once a week. The report stated that parents actually believe in the education and mental stimulation that the game brings to their child.

So much for the ‘ol board game and quality family time.

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The image is a pretty good graphical representation of what happens on the internet within a 60 second time frame. Pretty amazing how much (stuff) goes on!
• 1500+ blog posts
• 98,000 new tweets
• 12,000 new ads on Craigslist
• 20,000 new posts on Tumblr
• 600 new videos (more than 24 hours worth) on YouTube
• More than 3,000 images each minute to Flickr

It’s no wonder that it is difficult at times to find exactly what you are looking for on the web and a lot of search engines return duplicate and/ or worthless results.

A little fun factoid to ponder: In 2012, internet users in the U.S. will expand by 3.1% to 239 million, representing 75.6% of the total population.

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Serious Gaming in the United States Military

In an article featured in the August 2011 issue of Military Training Technology the magazine asked, “What role(s) will your company best fill as the United States military turns more to the use of serious gaming in an effort to reduce the military’s training costs while maintaining the combat readiness of the warfighter?”

Virtual Worlds for the Defense Sector

The Department of Defense has been in the news on a number of occurrences in past months highlighting the use of virtual worlds by the organization. They are utilizing virtual worlds for a host of different applications, one of which deals with post-traumatic stress in our soldiers, see this story for more details. This project is called The T2 Virtual PTSD Experience and is based in Second Life. By being based in Second Life it does allow an extra layer of interactivity as the player/ trainee is able to interact with anyone else that is experiencing the simulation. It just goes to show that the immersive nature of virtual worlds make them a prime candidate for this type of training and much more!

The Uncanny Valley

The blog post title may have you scratching the top of your head a little bit…The “Uncanny Valley” is a phenomenon that leads to a reaction from an all ‘but-not-quite-right’ simulated human form, whether it be robotic or animated. The term was invented by roboticist Masahiro Mori to depict the negative emotional response ‘real’ humans exhibit when a robot (avatar) seems practically human. Appearance and action are the two biggest factors that could potentially lead to this phenomenon playing out while one is immersed in a virtual world. Thus the overall quality of the avatar is paramount in any type of training simulation, the worst thing you can do is lead the player to possess detachment from the training. The human brain never ceases to amaze me.

Virtual Learning Environments- A New Trend?

Elearning! Magazine recently came out with a report on Virtual Learning Environments: Trends and Insights. The report outlined that virtual learning environments are one of the fastest growing solutions for learning. According to the report “In a June 2010 study conducted by Elearning! Media Group, 64 percent of all corporate respondents have implemented virtual learning within their organizations, and 18 percent more plan to add them. The same study reports virtual worlds for learning will grow 250 percent over the next year to 21 percent of enterprises. At the same time, social learning and collaboration is exploding, with 77 percent of enterprise using or planning to use these tools for learning.” Let me summarize that for you in case you weren’t paying attention…64 percent of respondents have implemented virtual learning within their organizations!

What Role are you Looking to Play?

An often-overlooked critical aspect of simulation training is the best manner in which to train: individual or collectively. Visual Purple offers three modes:
1) Single Player, Single Role – The trainee will always play one role; synchronous interaction with live players not supported or desirable due to intelligent simulation world.
Available: Decision-Based, Virtual World, Hybrid, Embedded

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A GisterPRO SaaS Exploratory Web Search starts in the Amazon cloud. An army of Drones (Intelligent Web Crawlers) read all results- tens of thousands of documents- from fifteen search engines carefully selected to cast a wide net. Only the best results (Gisted Results) are presented for rapid review and sorting.

Gisted Results include thumbnail snapshots and metrics generated by precisely reading unstructured data from web pages and documents in an automatic, unbiased manner. This assures the user that their search terms will be in the returned pages and documents while rejecting search engine optimization strategies and profit biasing of results by search engines.

Rapid filtering of Gisted Results is achieved by sorting a unique and powerful reporting metric: Closeness Factor. This is an amalgamation of factors that report on how significantly the search terms are related to each other in a specific document.

Discovered Entities, automatically extracted terms of interest, are displayed with concepts and linkages on an interactive Globe, encouraging easy search exploration and refinement by clicking Globe terms. Simply put, GisterPRO both helps to construct the question, and rapidly reveal the best answers.

Discovered Entities are both listed and intelligently grouped (Automatic Disambiguation) on the Globe presenting the best data picture available from the entire text corpus acquired by the search. This projection- the story of the data- often reveals important or actionable intelligence and empowers the user to drill down.

September 2011 marked the official release of the production version of GisterPRO as both Software as a Service (SaaS) and customized for clients with special considerations and requirements, in both the OSINT World and the Enterprise. You can learn more information about GisterPRO by downloading the Product Overview below or visiting the GisterPRO website at www.GisterPRO.com to sign-up for a 14-day trial.

And don’t worry… We haven’t lost our simulation roots. We continue to do three worlds of custom-built simulation training for select clients and licensing of our authoring technology.

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Multi-user 3D environments once held so much promise, the idea just may have been ahead of its time. Back in December of last year I wrote about the hype cycle provided by Gartner which shows a timeline of 5 to 10 years for mainstream adoption of public virtual worlds. Funny that three years after the fact of Gartner saying virtual worlds would have 80 percent of all active internet users that just last year they said another 5 to 10 years for mainstream adoption. According to a post on Hypergrid Business “Virtual worlds gained 214 million new users in the second quarter of 2011“, according to virtual worlds research firm KZero Worldwide. It was the largest quarterly increase since the company began tracking these numbers in 2008.” Second Life has 27 million registered users, so they say. How many of them have actually logged in within the last 3 months is unknown to most.

I believe that since the growth of mobile computing and the sea of apps that 3D virtual worlds might just once again have a chance. So let’s not completely write them off- perhaps Gartner should extend their prediction and also expand it to include some other popular virtual worlds of today rather than yesterday’s world of Second Life. I believe that 3D virtual worlds (with purpose) still have a lot of unreached potential to capitalize on in the future.

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