[From Reuters] “The Sims” designer creating new game for real life By John Gaudiosi RALEIGH, North Carolina | Mon Jan 2, 2012 (Reuters) – Will Wright, the designer behind successful video game simulations including “SimCity”, “The Sims” and “Spore”, is at it again. Only this time, rather than controlling virtual people or creating space creatures, the protagonist of “HiveMind” is the actual player. “HiveMind,” a group of cross-platform, cross-media online applications, is designed to turn a gamer’s everyday life into part of the interactive experience by building upon Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and tapping into streams of personal information on…

[From MIT’s Technology Review, where the story includes a 1:13 minute video] Eye Ball A globe studded with cameras captures a panorama if you throw it in the air. By Stephen Cass If you toss this foam-covered ball skyward, an accelerometer inside determines when it has reached its maximum height. At that moment, 36 cameras are triggered simultaneously, creating a mosaic that can be downloaded and viewed on a computer as one spherical panoramic image. The ball was created by researchers at the Technische Universität Berlin after one of them, Jonas Pfeil, labored to create panoramas while on vacation in…

[A press release from EarthCam via PRWeb; the release includes additional images and a 5:43 minute video] [Image: EarthCam’s street-level webcam, located at 46th and Broadway, puts viewers face-to-face with the crowd.] EarthCam Welcomes 2012 with a 3D New Year’s Eve Webcast Live from Times Square Broadcast for web and mobile from over 50 locations worldwide. New York, NY (PRWEB) December 28, 2011 Once again, EarthCam will be the exclusive provider of the live 3D feeds from Times Square and will serve as host to the world as it presents its 16th annual webcast of the New Year’s Eve celebrations…

[From Medical Xpress] [Image: This photo, courtesy Societe des Arts technologiques (SAT), shows a child following the movements of an avatar (on screen) during a demonstration of a new therapy designed to treat anxiety and social behavior issues, at the St. Justine Hospital Center in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.] Doctors look to treat sick children in virtual worlds Doctors in a domed laboratory in Canada are designing a virtual world where they hope to one day treat traumatized children with colorful avatars using toy-like medical gadgets. December 27, 2011 by Michel Viatteau Sensory stimulation could be used to make a burn…

[From The Toronto Star] [Image: A video still from Lynne Marsh’s “Stadium,” a video work currently on display as part of “Hyper Spaces” Oakville Galleries.] Review: Oakville Gallery’s Hyper Spaces Oakville Gallery’s Hyper Spaces conjures up the strange things that occur when real and virtual space collide By Murray Whyte Dec 22, 2011 “We have entered the future,” or so says the intro blurb to Hyper Spaces, the current show at Oakville Galleries, and it’s an ambitious, if literally impossible, declaration (the future, being the future, can’t be inhabited or seen until it becomes the present, at which point it’s…

[From The New York Times, where the story includes an additional image] Video Chat Reshapes Domestic Rituals By Julie Scelfo December 21, 2011 After nightfall on Tuesday, the Darvick family of Birmingham, Mich., began their Hanukkah rituals, just as they had done for years. Debra and Martin Darvick set out a tin menorah given to them by long-gone relatives. Their son, Elliot, 27, struck a match and lighted the first candle. And his sister, Emma, 24, joined in a prayer. But the Darvicks celebrated this centuries-old tradition with a modern twist — the family was in three different cities across…

[From The Washington Post; for more, see a post in Discover magazine’s Science Not Fiction blog] Backyard astronomy and the weird future By Aaron Leitko, Monday, December 12, 2011 [snip] How I learned to stop worrying and love my virtual reality Chicago Humanities Festival Between smartphones that answer your casual questions and mass-multiplayer videogames, it’s getting more difficult to make a distinction between the real world and the one inside your laptop. But why worry about it? Go to www.chicagohumanities.org and watch William Gibson — who wrote the sci-fi classic “Neuromancer” and coined the term “cyberspace” — talking at the…

[From Cisco’s The Network] [Image from The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington: “Santa’s Video Conference Call to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital Santa Claus says “Hello from the North Pole” to Jason Pratt, 4, via a video conference at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, December 13, 2011. In reality Santa was holed up in a hospital conference room. Ryan Mathus, left, a systems engineer with Cisco Systems Inc., was a member of the team that wheeled the portable video-link setup into young patients’ rooms who would have had difficulty being transported from their rooms to visit Santa. Registered nurse Shannon Jackson is…

[From BBC News; additional information follows below] [Image: Actor Liam Neeson poses for a portrait prior to the press conference to announce the 2012 European Tour of Jeff Wayne’s musical version of War Of The Worlds New Generation (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)] Liam Neeson joins War of the Worlds musical as hologram By Tim Masters Entertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News 18 November 2011 Liam Neeson is to appear as a 3D hologram in a new version of Jeff Wayne’s long-running The War of the Worlds musical. The actor takes over the narrator role from Richard Burton, whose holographic…

[From JSOnline’s Art City blog; the post includes a 1:48 minute video] Lisa Frank’s wide open art cave By Karin Wolf, Art City contributor Dec. 16, 2011 If you have lived even a few decades, you know the excitement that comes with technological advances that change your assumptions about reality. Photographer Lisa Frank’s master’s thesis exhibition “<1>: “der” //Pattern for a Virtual Environment” takes viewers right through such a gateway to the future. To experience Frank’s wonder cave one must pass through three security clearance checkpoints and descend deep into the underbelly of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID). After…

[From The Washington Post] “Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation,” by B. Coleman By Alex Shakar, Published: December 16 In his recent cri de coeur, “You Are Not a Gadget,” technologist Jaron Lanier laments the course the World Wide Web has taken in its second decade. Far from the early visions of cyberspace and jacking into virtual worlds without end, he tells us, we’ve been given a flat world of information, an airless zoo where we find ourselves in the cages. We reduce ourselves to “multiple-choice identities” on social networks and give away our precious content for nothing, to…

[From NPR, where the report includes audio and a transcript] [Image: Drone pilots are fighting a war from the safety of bases in the U.S., but are confronting some of the same wartime stresses as their comrades on the battlefield. Damian Dovarganes/AP.] Report: High Levels Of ‘Burnout’ In U.S. Drone Pilots by Rachel Martin December 19, 2011 Around 1,100 Air Force pilots fly remotely piloted aircraft – or drones. These planes soar over Iraq or Afghanistan but the pilots sit at military bases back in the United States. A new Pentagon study shows that almost 30 percent of drone pilots…