[From Mashable, where the story includes a 0:55 minute video] Travel Through 2,000 Years of Paris’ History With Interactive 3D Model October 5, 2012 by Zoe Fox If you’re a fan of time travel, exploring cities, history or virtual reality experiences, you’re going to love the latest project from Dassault Systèmes. With the help of historians and archeologists, Dassault has created Paris 3d, an interactive model that transports any Internet user through two millennia of the city’s history. See how the French capital developed since its Roman conquest in 52 BC until the present day. Witness the construction of the…

[From The Miami Student; more information is available in The HIVE: A Huge Immersive Virtual Environment for research in spatial cognition (in press) (pdf).] Students explore virtual reality in HIVE By Samantha Wargolet for The Miami Student Published: Tuesday, October 2, 2012 Participants enter a grocery store full of food with a shopping list in hand, and a timer begins to count down from six minutes. As they walk around the aisles, it is slightly difficult to walk straight, and the items on the shelf are impossible to pick up. These shoppers are not at your local Kroger; they are…

[From VentureBeat] Zugara’s virtual dressing rooms take the X factor out of online shopping September 25, 2012 Rebecca Grant No matter how good a piece of clothing looks online, the reality often falls short. The joy of ripping open a package is destroyed when you discover that a particular shade of teal makes you look seasick or that leopard print jeans are a far better idea in theory. Sometimes, you need to try things on to know if they are right, and this is a frustration shared by web retailers and customers alike. Zugara was granted a patent today for its…

[From The Sydney Morning Herald] Google’s 360-degree tour of endangered reefs September 26, 2012 James Manning, Technology reporter Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been opened to an audience of more than one billion people worldwide as Google launches a virtual tour of one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Users can log on to Street View on Google Maps and Google Earth and explore high-resolution, 360-degree images of the reef that are being gathered as part of the Catlin Seaview Survey, which documents the health of coral reefs around the world. “The project is as much about the…

[From News-Medical.net] [Image: Rendering of physical environment represented in the AbES software; in gamer mode, the player (yellow icon) navigates through the virtual environment using auditory cues to locate hidden jewels (blue squares) and avoid being caught by chasing monsters (red icons).] ‘Video game’ teaches blind people to navigate buildings Published on September 25, 2012 By Liam Davenport, medwireNews Reporter Blind people can learn the spatial layout of an unfamiliar building using a novel “video game” virtual reality environment that employs only audio-based cues, thus enabling them to learn skills that may improve functional independence, say US and Chilean scientists.…