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The July issue of our newsletter is available for download. Stories in this issue include:

• Virtual Birmingham
• Solent Life
• Grimsby Newsbot
• PREVIEW Project

Read the Newsletter (pdf).

Our Google Maps in Second Life implementation, as used by Digital Birmingham, is getting a lot of blog coverage. Read the NPIRL and Digital Urban posts, and see Digital Urban's video. Our own video will be coming shortly. Essentially it brings all the key functionality of Google Maps into SL, including plotting and clicking on data points.The system is on permanent display on Daden Prime in SL.

Gartner quoted in Virtual Worlds News has updated its 2007 forecast about virtual worlds take-up. On the up side Gartner forecast that 70% of "organisations" will have private virtual worlds by 2012 - reinforcing our belief that we are entering an era of Intraworlds (see our Dec 07 newsletter). The down-side is that they reckon 90% of corporate virtual worlds experiments "fail" within 18 months. Of course if its an experiment you will always learn, and these are early days, and as Gartner points out these experiments are averaging only $50,000, so for a big corporate there's a lot that's being learnt for minimal outlay. As we've widely commented most of the early corporate presences were far too information centric, and had no avatar presence, and so its no suprise that they didn't return more conventional benefits.

We've just uploaded a couple of videos to YouTube which show our work-in-progress on the JISC PREVIEW project looking at problem based learning within virtual worlds and health care. The first looks at the Medbiquitous Virtual Patient player which we are working on within the context of paramedic training, and the second is a bit of eDrama using our Discourse chatbot engine. We hope to get the MVP SL player to Beta by mid June. More information on the project at the PREVIEW web site.

This story in the FT has been spreading fast around the virtual world blogs - a McKinsey staffer coming out with choice quotes like "any consumer-facing business "absolutely" had to be "experimenting in virtual worlds" if it wanted to get the attention of under 30s.", and that they were "ignoring them at their peril" and that virtual worlds were "on the cusp of a major expansion". The interview is in support of a new McKinsey report on virtual worlds. Whilst the FT appears to have added a certain amount of hyperbole, and a few inaccuracies like "which costs $9.95 to join", we have to agree with the sentiment!

Update 28th April: Please note that we still have some issues with layout and links on the new site. These will be resolved over the next 48 hours. If you find a dead link then please use the site map to find the page you want. We apologise for any inconvenience. Customer live services are unaffected and are working normally on the news servers. Update 29th - just about there!

Due to our growth over the last year we are having to make some changes to our servers and to our web site. This work is being carried out from around 1700 on 26th April to about 0100 27th April. During this time their may be brief outages to our live services, and the web site is being rebuilt on MT4 and so may not be available in whole or part for some of this period. Please bear with us during the update, and we hope that the new servers and CMS will enable us to offer an improved service once the upgrade is complete.

Our April newsletter is available to download. Items this month include:

- Mixing real and virtual worlds
- Birmingham City University: Students go on location in SL
- Hanover chatbot launched
- Open Simulator
- New worlds: QwaQ
- New Worlds: Twinity
- Introducing SME's into virtual worlds
- Virtual Conferencing a hit for HIT
- The Preview Project
- SGI Heritage Day
- Virtual Worlds and Serious Business
- Events

As ever any comments or questions are welcome, and if there is a particular project that you are working on, or thinking of, where virtual worlds or virtual characters could help then please get in touch.

Download the Newsletter

NEWS RELEASE 391LP0308

A Birmingham City University project is researching the use of a three-dimensional, virtual environment for learning and assessment. The Learning in Virtual Environments (LiVE) project will see students undertake film production exercises, using the internet-based virtual world, ‘Second Life’.

We've just released a web based chatbot we've done for Hanover Housing - a housing association group here in the UK. The Bot uses the same Discourse engine that drives our Second Life chatbots, and indeed the engine can drive the same bot in multiple worlds and on multiple web sites. The bot has already helped generate over 10,000 hits for the site, and gives users a plain language guide to Hanover Housing and the content of the web site - a key concern given the potential target audience. The bot uses the Sitepal system, which gives not only a flash based moving head-and-shoulders avatar, but also a text-to-speech engine so that every bot reply is said out loud - just right for those with poorer vision.

Maverick Television have just released a Second Life Science City video which covers some of our work on this project and features Daden MD David Burden both running a workshop and doing the odd piece to camera. Watch out for pics of our offices and our Millennium Point build.