[From Telepresence Options] The Immersive Technology Summit – A Review November 10, 2010 | Howard Lichtman Two weeks ago I spoke at the Immersive Technology Summit in Los Angeles, an event put together by the non-profit ImTech, which is supporting the development and adoption of immersive technologies.  The one-day summit, emceed by Ken Rutowski of KenRadio,  drew hundreds of participants from around the world with tens of thousands more watching the live streams.  The summit took place at Los Angeles Center Studios in the heart of Hollywood and created a hot tub atmosphere that brought together luminaries from technology and the arts…

[From the MIT Technology Review blog Mim’s Bits, which contains an additional image and reader comments] [Image: Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for “Virtual Reality”] Whatever Happened to … Virtual Reality? Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Here’s why we’re not even close. Christopher Mims 10/22/2010 The early 90’s were awesome. Bill Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and Apple was more or less on its way out.…

[From PC World; more information is in a news story here; the Intellitar web site is here] Digital Afterlife Beckons From Cloud-based Service By Stephen Lawson, IDG News People who die in Hollywood movies often find themselves floating around on a cloud as angels. Now a startup in Huntsville, Alabama, will let you go to a different kind of cloud after you die: the computing kind. The two-year-old company, called Intellitar, lets people create intelligent avatars or “intellitars” of themselves now, so they can spend time with their ancestors forever. The avatars are designed to look and talk like their…

[From iPhone World] Apple’s new patent for multiplayer GPS enabled interactive iPhone games November 5, 2010 by iPhoneWorld A newly unveiled Apple patent (USPTO #20100279768) reveals Apple’s plans for multiplayer, location-aware interactive iPhone games. In a nutshell the patent describes how iPhones could be used for real-world cooperative gameplay, using the iPhone’s sensors, camera, GPS module and WiFi/wireless internet connection.…

[From The Express] VOYAGE TO MARS? WE’RE ALREADY THERE! As a one-way trip to the Red Planet is mooted, we reveal how, deep in the most inhospitable places on Earth, astronauts are already living as if they were actually colonising Mars. Saturday October 30,2010 By Jane Warren The idea of making a new life on Mars is strangely hypnotic. It may be famously inhospitable – there’s hardly any oxygen and if you step out unsuited your lungs will explode due to the thin atmosphere – but these drawbacks don’t seem to stop the allure of the Red Planet in the…

[From Wired, which features a 1:40 minute video] Holographic Telecommuting May Soon Be Possible By Lisa Grossman November 3, 2010 A new holographic display can transmit three-dimensional movies from one location to another almost in real time. If Princess Leia had to send her “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” message from Earth today, it would now be technologically possible. “We can take objects from one location and show them in another location in 3-D in near real time,” said optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian, and project leader from the University of Arizona in a press conference Nov.…