MBI Holodeck

Another company (see Casual Cafe, Moondo, Flowplay) tries to be successful with browser-based flash games: Fusionfall. Fusionfall is aimed at 9-14 year old kids and features characters from the 3D cartoon network.

To be exact, FusionFall doesn’t use flash for displaying the game, but Unity. For the user it works the same, but he/she has to [...]

Moondo, is not only a new set of Flash games for your browser, but more a mix of persistant 3D MMOs and simpler Flash games. Within its world, Moondo stores the player’s achievements, its virtual goods and playing levels.
In Moondo, there are many different games to play, and there are all within a [...]

CasualCafe is an online social arcade for Flash games that you can share with anybody. You have to buy tokens (aka Cafe Credit) to enjoy the offerings:

Games: Spyde Solitaire and Burdaloo. Spyde is a new twist on a classic card game, while Burdaloo sends you on a tropical burd matching vacation not to be missed. [...]

Urban takeover is a game part that is played partly in the web, partly in the real world. The idea is:

Conquer your city by tagging spots with your stickers.
Claim new spots or cross other players to beat the highscore

You can register for free ant Urban takeover and get the necessary stickers. As I saw on [...]

Travian is a browser game featuring a world with thousands of other real players. One begins the game acting as a chief of a tiny village. You don’t need to install anything on your PC, just register and join about 125.000 active players.

The main activities are:

You play with thousands of real players in a persistent [...]

Artificial life is an interesting research field at the junction of many scientific disciplines. I had the pleasure to read three books that cover this topic from different perspectives.
The first and maybe most complete of them is Mitchell Whitelaw’s “Metacreation. Art and Artificial Life.” It is an introduction into this field as well as a [...]

There is a new book on the shelves: Augmented Reality. A practical guide.
Augmented Reality is the fusion of real and virtual reality, where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real-time. AR creates the illusion that virtual, computer-generated objects exist in the real world. All you need is a computer and a webcam. [...]

Outspark is a new player in the online game market, offering games for free and getting revenues from virtual goods sale. As reported, this is a model that works very well in Korean and Chinese online gaming markets.
But I have my doubt, that this is going to improve game mobility. See my comments about this [...]

From the Gogofrog-Website:
Gogofrog™ takes you into the ultimate 3D world. No downloads just the internet in 3D. Create your own ulimited online space, it’s fast, easy and free. Do things you simply can’t in 2D … See and chat with your site visitors, furnish your environment and change your whole space or yourself to suit [...]

When we talk about virtual worlds and avatars, we immediately discuss concepts like second life, virtual life or virtual identity. By common sense, we understand virtual identity as something not real as our physical environment, but real in some sense that what we do in virtual worlds is real to us. As we’re present in [...]