[From Business 2 Community] Virtual World Real Potential By Michael Katz, Published March 20, 2012 Walking into a bar or nightclub alone and striking up a conversation with a stranger is daunting for the majority of people. By nature, most people have insecurities which inhibit them from doing such a thing. But now, the latest addition to the world of virtual reality enables people to feel comfortable doing exactly that. Based within an application inside Facebook, Dot Friends allows users to determine exactly how they look, what they wear and even how they move on the dance floor. The application,…

[From The Miami Herald;  the Cisco press release, which includes links to images, video and other coverage of the event, is available here] Region’s first ‘virtual summit’ should set the trend By Andres Oppenheimer [email protected] March 7, 2012 The presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile did a smart thing the other day, which could save Latin America a lot of time, money and insufferable speeches in the future: they held the region’s first virtual summit. The four leaders, who are preparing to launch a free trade bloc in June that will be known as the Alliance of the Pacific,…

[From Atomic] Virtual Reality comes to Skyrim Killing the chickens at Whiterun never felt so good, but man, you will look like an idiot in this homebrew VR gear! By Vito Cassisi March 19, 2012 The idea of virtual reality interaction has intrigued the minds of many generations, yet has struggled to get a foothold in mainstream acceptance. Potential users have core expectations for VR technology including reliability, convincing immersiveness, and the ability to play without throwing up all over company. An entrepreneur by the name of Chris Zaharia has produced his own “immersive” VR solution for playing Skyrim on…

[From The Verge’s Vox Games] Creating the illusion of emotion or why you care about ones and zeroes By Brian Crecente on March 12, 2012 As much as you may love video games and the stories they help you tell, it’s impossible to escape the fact that much of your experience is a trick of the mind. The thing that separates video games from other forms of media, the ability to interact with and perhaps shape a virtual world, is mostly powered by the artificial intelligence of the characters that populate that experience. But at its best gaming artificial intelligence systems,…

[From Voice of San Diego; more information, including a comparison of answers by the virtual candidate and the iPhone’s Siri, is available here] The Tragic and Fascinating Life of Carl DeMaio Posted: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 | Updated: Wed Mar 14, 2012 by Liam Dillon Carl DeMaio’s favorite color is blue. He usually eats dessert before his dinner. He’s afraid of heights, loves zombie movies and one time, when he was a high school freshman, he caught his tie in a newspaper vending machine. DeMaio freed himself from the machine by surrendering his neckwear. He still remembers how the tie…

[From Ars Technica] [Image: Forth Dimension’s display technology packs all the pixels of a new iPad into a display less than an inch across, diagonally] Virtual reality that doesn’t suck: My time inside Half-Life 2 By Kyle Orland | Published March 13, 2012 For decades now, the futuristic dream interface for video games has been some sort of head-mounted display (HMD) that removes the world around you and projects an all-encompassing, head-tracked 3D environment across your entire field of vision. But this dream has been largely dead in the water since the mid-’90s, when everyone from Nintendo and Sega to…