Architectural design firm Creative Kingdom will build an entire planet within Entropia Universe. The collaboration is significant as it's part of the firm's expansion into Thailand, where it will build a film, television and technology production complex called Cyber City.

The $250 million Cyber City project is underwritten by the Thai government, as well as a consortium of entrepreneurs. There's enthusiasm there for continuing development in entertainment and technology, and Robles LLC, the firm owned by CKI CEO Eduardo Robles, will also develop a movie based on the new Entropia Universe planet, co-produced by CKA Starlight Studios Beijing, and Korea's Dabok Entertainment Co. to be released in 2010.

Said MindArk CIO Marco Behrmann, "This long-term partnership with CKI is the perfect match for Mindark. It further proves the viability of the Entropia Universe platform as the foundation of creating entertaining and exciting online virtual experiences, as well as giving our partners access to a very secure, proven and stable system for handling real cash transactions within a MMORG," Mindark CIO Marco Behrmann informs.

IBM has unveiled a "Virtual Healthcare Island" in Second Life, intended to support its strategic vision for healthcare it released in 2006. The island itself is intended as a 3D representation of the issues and challenges facing the industry unveiled in that paper, hoping to highlight the role information technology will play.

The project was designed and built by a team from IBM India with support from U.S. project leads, and offers an interactive demo of the company's Health Information Exchange architecture.

In the interactive experience, avatars create their personal health records and watch it incorporate into electronic medical record systems accessible at various medical facilities. Users can then navigate among the different island stations to see how their electronic health records are used in a network that can only be accessed by authorized health systems and family members.

Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM Global Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry, commented, "We are pleased to offer our IBM Virtual Health Island as a tool for our healthcare customers and our worldwide sales force. The island allows each healthcare stakeholder to envision how the total system can be affected by intercession at each juncture of the healthcare delivery process. We believe that the use of our new virtual world provides an important, next-generation Internet-based resource to show how standards; business planning; the use of a secured, extensible and expandable architecture; HIE interoperability; and data use for healthcare analytics, quality, wellness and disease management are all helping to transform our industry."

The U.S. Intelligence community is looking into World of Warcraft and other MMOs, aiming to create software that will pick out extremists and terrorists in online worlds. The news comes from a report from the Director of National Intelligence, and discusses what's being called "The Reynard Project," which will profile online gaming behavior with the goal of "automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

It'll accomplish its objectives by studying cultural and behavioral norms in online worlds, says RINF News. It looks like the Intelligence Department thinks it's possible to flag and detect suspicious behavior through an automated system. The scope of the project includes developing software to automatically identify faces, events and objects in video, a surveillance system with a corresponding threat warning system, and a tool to access databases to find patterns of bad behavior.

Given the human-behind-every-avatar factor, the Intelligence Department's goals seem more than a bit lofty. One need only look at the constantly evolving challenge of moderating and ensuring the safety of kids in environments like Club Penguin -- during the kids' worlds panel at the Worlds in Motion Summit, Club Penguin's Lane Merrifield explained that maintaining safety in the environment is a round-the-clock job that requires continuous live moderation, suggesting that automated behavior monitoring is impossible.

Why, exactly? Because Club Penguin users can learn and develop their own ways around the restrictions, of course. If a kids' world can't create automation to prevent 12 year olds from swearing, it seems doubtful that the government could automate behavior tracking for determined and organized violent adults.

Guild Wars publisher NCsoft and its developer, ArenaNet, have announced that the franchise of MMORPGs has sold over five million units in North America, Europe and Asia.

The franchise consists of the original Guild Wars, Guild Wars Factions, Guild Wars Nightfall, and a recently released expansion, Guild Wars: Eye of the North, with Guild Wars 2 currently in development.

The announcement comes despite the fact that falling sales of Guild Wars contributed to a 16 percent drop in sales for NCsoft in 2007 over the year prior.

NCsoft CEO Taek Jin Kim commented, "Guild Wars is a proven success and has set a new standard for online RPG games with its unique business model and superior playability. ArenaNet is dedicated to creating games that expand the market and provide great new content to our loyal player base. This success has built a great foundation from which the next generation of Guild Wars games will grow."

Swiss building management company Implenia has been running some interesting experiments connecting the virtual and the real involving a Playmobil doll house, reports the Guardian. The toy house is equipped with various digital sensors that correspond to a virtual replica in Second Life, and the virtual version reflects changes made to the real house -- such as turning the thermostat up, or leaving a door open.

The technology's intended to make it possible to someday monitor and manage homes and buildings without necessarily being on-site, reducing expense by centralizing it through a single interface. They're also experimenting with the same technology in the hopes of creating safety systems for the elderly.

[The house where real and virtual worlds meet | The Guardian]

We recently reported on the U.S. Intelligence Department's plan to peek inside virtual worlds, hoping to develop an automated system that would flag suspicious behavior in the hunt for possible terrorists. At the time, we theorized that it was too lofty a goal, given that just moderating swear words in kids' worlds is an ever-evolving challenge to automate.

Now, an academic has weighed in at Salon; Juan Coles, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, says that this kind of oversight would be not only infeasible, but unconstitutional:

"Any monitoring by law enforcement of innocuous activity and communication in a virtual world, conducted broadly and without oversight, would be unconstitutional and could invade the privacy of millions of persons. I found no evidence based on my own observations that a virtual world is suitable for planning a terror operation. The anxieties of terrorism "experts" and government officials may also reflect a fear of being not so easily able to extend broad, unchecked surveillance into this new virtual frontier, even if doing so may well accomplish nothing in terms of protecting national security."

The article also suggests that virtual worlds are less than ideal breeding grounds for terrorist groups, given the difficulty in translating virtual weapons and plans into real ones. While it's true that online worlds provide the opportunity for disparate groups to unify and organize, the same could be said for any connected interactive experience -- and one would think that simple email, social networking or simple informational websites would serve as more useful and less transparent communication tools than online worlds. Coles' conclusion? It's government anxiety about a new medium and their poor understanding of it, not an actual terrorist threat, that's at work here.

[Via Eurogamer, Image credit Salon]

Siemens PLM Software has announced it has created a tool to let users make their own razor scooters in Second Life. The tool is meant to show Second Life users the possibilities of CAD software -- such as Siemens' 2D/3D Solid Edge design system.

The company says that demoing its products in virtual worlds is an essential part of its strategy to stay current in the 3D modeling industry. Siemens has an extensive Second Life presence, and continues outreach and demonstrations in the virtual world.

Siemens PLM VP of platforms and partners Chris Kelley explained, "This new tool is a great example of how companies can use some of the unique characteristics of the Second Life platform to create interactive experiences for their products. Our goal in Second Life continues to be to find new ways to collaborate with our customers and partners in an effort to provide a more immersive way to experience our software. The user experience in Second Life is based upon our successful Solid Edge Dare to Compare Test Drive events where you learn first-hand how easy it is to use Solid Edge compared to competitive products."

Some news we missed out of the recent 2008 Toy Fair: Disney will be introducing some new toys based on its Disney Fairies avatar creation site. It'll collaborate with electronic toy company Techno Source to extend Pixie Hollow playtime into a product line that connects with the online world.

Disney says users have created more than 4.5 million unique fairy avatars to date at the site. With the launch of the toys, they expect to broaden the userbase and provide inroads for new users as well. The toys are charm bracelets and jewelry boxes that unlock gifts on the Disney Fairies site that kids can share with one another

Techno Source EVP Eric Levin commented, “Disney and Techno Source are turning the Internet-toy business model on its ear. For starters, while many toy companies are creating online worlds to support their latest offline products, we are starting with the most successful, immersive virtual worlds for which children already have a strong emotional connection. With the Clickables technology, we take it one step further by allowing their virtual play to continue into the real world with products that naturally align with their existing play patterns and extend their engagement with the Disney Fairies experience in the enchanting online world of Pixie Hollow.”

[In Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra's latest China Angle column, dealing with all matters related to the vital Chinese game market, Frank Yu looks at the government's continued 'Operation for Tomorrow' crackdown, now targeting MMO game clients in internet cafes - and whether browser plugins like Flash and Shockwave, traditionally spurned by cafe users, may now point the way to the next 'console' of choice. The following excerpt deals specifically with Habbo's case.]

When Habbo Hotel shut down operations in China on August 2007, one of the main reasons cited was the reluctance of Chinese users to download Shockwave onto their machine -- the core plugin that enabled the browser-based virtual space to work.

At GDC 2008’s Worlds in Motion Summit, I asked the keynote speaker, Habbo lead concept designer Sulka Haro, why the Hotel was shut down in China when it has worked so well in other global locations. “There is no China. China doesn’t exist,“ was his jetlagged reply, adding “You should ask the business guys in China that question, I’m just the designer.”

Conveniently, Journi Keranen, the former business head of Habbo China and now president of iLemon in Shanghai was sitting next to me. “Yes, Shockwave was the problem at first. The servers were slow from the US and users didn’t want to download the plugin each time since the cafes would wipe it clean every day from their machines," he said.

"However," he continued, "we did manage to solve the server issue at some point with an agreement with Macromedia (developers of Shockwave, now part of Adobe) to have a customized plugin to be served locally. By then however, it was already too late and the decision to suspend operations was already in motion. However, we also had issues with headquarters on changes for localization.”

[The full column is now available at Gamasutra.]

Raph Koster, President of Areae, began the session by noting that for this last lecture of the day, he and his company’s lead programmer Sean Riley would give the audience what went right and what went wrong on the MetaPlace project. “You’d rather have that than a sales job, right?” he asked. The audience responded enthusiastically.

The Current State of MMOs

He began by railing against much of what’s currently ingrained in MMOs. MMO games are now extremely hard to make, and Koster described each project as “a custom-crafted moon shoot.” Despite all the effort that goes into an MMO, Koster notes that they are poorly integrated with the rest of the internet.

In the current space, only the big companies can play because of cost, and there’s a significant amount of reinvention happening throughout the industry. More often than not, designers are told to “make it like WoW” as the huge costs frustrate any attempts on innovation.

Koster looked at how MMOs work today: giant monolithic servers that contain all the services needed, with complex server cluster architectures and a very tight dependency between client and server. “There are virtually no successful reuses of MMO servers,” Riley said.

A slide showed how the previous model of a simple client-server relationship paled next to the complexity of a modern MMO system, with static and runtime databases, global chat servers, process managers, authorization systems, patching systems, and others whose representation became a mass of hundreds of circles on the slide.

Koster then presented an alternative to this current MMO system. The alternative would be low-cost to develop for, extremely scalable, future-proof, modular, and has resulted in explosions of creativity: The Web.

Hit the jump for the full coverage!

[U.S. Intelligence-gathering in virtual worlds to prevent real terrorism has been a hot discussion topic this week; first, we theorized on the feasibility of automating behavior monitoring; next, a professor named Juan Coles weighed in, calling it unconstitutional. Now, Mitch Wagner at Worlds in Motion sister site Information Week discusses why, despite our resistance to government monitoring, there might indeed be a viable terror threat in Web 2.0 technology and online worlds, breaking down Coles' recent Salon article along with plenty of other recent coverage in the following opinion piece.]

We've recently seen silly articles hyping the threat of terrorists using virtual worlds and other Web 2.0 sites for recruitment, planning, and training. And we've seen equally silly articles ridiculing the idea. The truth is that Web 2.0 tools are great for terrorism, for the same reasons they're great for legitimate projects. That doesn't mean we should shut down Facebook and Second Life to protect ourselves from instant, horrible death. But we do need to rationally evaluate possible threats.

Salon weighs in with the latest silly article:

Lately there has been some rather bizarre hype about the potential threat from terrorists in cyberspace. Security specialists have been expressing increasing concern about the potential for mischief with Web 2.0. In particular, during the past six months a spate of newspaper articles have been citing security experts about the alleged danger that terrorists will use virtual worlds for nefarious purposes. Groups such as the U.S. government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity say they fear that terrorists -- using virtual personas called "avatars" -- will recruit new members online, transfer funds in ways that cannot be traced, and may engage in training exercises that are useful for real-world terrorist operations. They point to existing "terrorist groups" operating on virtual reality sites as an ominous sign.

If you follow the first two links in that paragraph, you'll find the best and worst recent journalism about terrorism and Web 2.0. The Washington Post does a solid job discussing the problem. But the newspaper the Australian gets all sensationalistic and dumb. I had a good time ridiculing the Australian article when it first came out in July.

The threat of terrorists using Web 2.0 is real. The same characteristics that make Second Life and other Web 2.0 tools great for collaboration on legitimate projects make them great for collaboration by terrorists: The tools are inexpensive, they're easy to use, you can use them anonymously and shield your real identity, they're globally available, and they facilitate communications between teams of people.

The Salon article ridicules the idea that Second Life could be used for rehearsing terrorist activities. But why is that ridiculous? We've seen Second Life used for anti-terrorism training. Orkin is looking into Second Life for multiple training simulations, including house inspection and handling chemicals, according to an article in Wired.

The Wired article adds, sensibly: "Real-world training and certification will always be necessary, [David Lamb, Orkin's VP of learning and media services] notes, but -- especially in the early stages of training -- real savings could be seen through a virtual online environment." There's no reason terrorists might not enjoy those same advantages.

Do terrorists have the wherewithal to use Web 2.0 tools? After all, everybody knows that terrorists are recruited from the poorest of the poor, from the slums of Riyadh and Beirut and Tehran. They don't have computers and Internet access -- they don't even have indoor plumbing and electricity. Right?

Not so much:

Even leaving aside multimillionaire Osama bin Laden, the backgrounds of the September 11 killers indicates that they were without exception scions of privilege: All were either affluent Saudis and Egyptians, citizens of the wealthy Gulf statelets, or rich sons of Lebanon, trained in and familiar with the ways of the West -- not exactly the victims of poverty in Muslim dictatorships. Many poor Egyptians, Moroccans, and Palestinians may support terrorists, but they do not -- and cannot -- provide them with recruits. In fact, Al Qaeda has no use for illiterate peasants. They cannot participate in World Trade Center-like attacks, unable as they are to make themselves inconspicuous in the West and lacking the education and training terrorist operatives need.

In other words, the people who become terrorists have access to PCs and high-speed Internet connections.

Faced with the prospect of terrorists using Web 2.0 tools, what should we do about it? We have three options:

*We can put our fingers in our ears and go la, la, la, la, la, la and pretend the problem doesn't exist.

*We can demonize Web 2.0 tools and virtual worlds, hold shrill government hearings, publish sensationalist headlines, scare the spit out of everybody, create thousands of pages of pointless government regulation, inconvenience hundreds of millions of Internet users, and wantonly violate civil rights.

*Or we can look into apparent terrorist threats on Web 2.0 sites, while keeping a cool head and letting the overwhelming majority of people continue using the sites for work, play, and -- most definitely -- political dissent.

Sensible precautions require that governments allocate funds to learn about Web 2.0 sites and virtual worlds, to consider how they might be used for terror, and how governments' legal powers of search and investigation might apply in those environments.

What do you think? Is terrorism using Web 2.0 a threat?

[The preceding article by Mitch Wagner originally ran at Worlds in Motion sister site Information Week.]

Nexon America has announced that its newest free-to-play MMO Mabinogi will enter open beta on March 5th. A 24-hour play period exclusive to FilePlanet.com users will kick the beta off, following which users can sign up at the main site.

Nexon says more than 7 million users already play Mabinogi in Asia, and notes that 30,000 players participated in the recent closed beta for North America. The game promises its users a "fantasy life" rooted in Celtic and Welsh mythology -- in addition to more traditional MMO activities like quests and moster battles, players can also take jobs, perform farming duties and write and share music, with strong social components.

Mabinogi also offers a distinct "standardized" time feature, that allows users who play longer to gain daily bonuses. Avatars also age on a weekly basis, growing taller as they get older until they reach age 17, and can gain ability points up to the age of 25.