[From Hypergrid Business] [Image: Virtual windsurfing in Second Life. Courtesy Club One.] Study: Virtual health club delivers real weight loss Press release: ACSM: Weight loss success in a 3-D virtual world By Staff Sat, Jun 4 2011 Bloomington, Indiana — Participants in two weight-loss programs — one involving traditional health club sessions and the other delivered online in a 3D virtual world — lost similar amounts of weight and body fat, but the online contingent reported significantly greater gains in behaviors that could help them live healthier and leaner lives. “It’s counter-intuitive, the idea of being more active in a…

[From Technische Universität München (TUM)] [Image: Researcher in the FRAVE] FRAVE: Flexible Virtual Reality System 31.05.2011, Press releases Product developers, vehicle design engineers and trainee pilots increasingly utilize 3D worlds, operating in virtual space created by realistic images in real time. For this purpose they use a Virtual Reality System. Researchers at the Faculty of Informatics of Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have now created precisely such a new system. The Flexible Reconfigurable Cave (FRAVE) offers a wealth of advantages over the previously established CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). The FRAVE is flexible, features a modular structure, more favorable costs and…

[From Mediaite] Anderson Cooper Resorts To Photographic Evidence To Convince Skeptical Fan His Talk Show Set Isn’t ‘Fake’ by Mark Joyella | May 12th, 2011 Since we’ve been a bit hard on CNN’s Anderson Cooper over his troubles with Twitter (like the story we did two months ago about Cooper, who has over a million followers, having no clear idea how to speak back to any of them; or the more recent story about Cooper’s accidental butt-tweet), we wanted to make you aware the silver-haired news anchor’s getting a lot better at engaging with all of those followers.…

[From Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] [Image: Becoming (2007), Silvia Ruzanka+Ben Chang, the avatar is one week into the transformation process. Image by Ben Chang] The New Cultural Form: Perfection versus Mortality in Games and Simulation at Rensselaer Electronic Artist Ben Chang Joins Rensselaer Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences Program Published April 18, 2011 Willy Nilly’s Surf Shack offers a cure for the idealized virtual world of Second Life. The online shop, a project of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Associate Professor of Arts Ben Chang and collaborators, endows otherwise flawless avatars with real-world foils like clumsiness. A project allowing avatars to visibly…