Digital Delights - Avatars, Virtual Worlds, Gamification

We're building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.

Research conference on virtual worlds - Learning with simulations: 21-23 November, 2013
In cooperation with VS-GAMES - international conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications

As boomers reach retirement age, two other generations will make up the majority of the American workforce: Generation X and Generation Y, also known as millennials. It’s important to consider millennials’ role. They have essentially grown up digital, and that has changed how they engage with others in their day-to-day work lives. They come to work expecting the same engagement they find in the digital world.

According to technology research company Gartner, by 2014, 70 percent of global organizations will have at least one gamified application; by 2015, 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify them. Many of the world’s largest brands are deploying gamification, including Coca-Cola, AOL, Nissan, Nike and Viacom, and as more studies become available, the advantages to gaming in the workplace will become widespread.

Games written with TADS can include graphics, animations, sound effects, fancy text formatting, and other multimedia features, using versatile and familiar HTML syntax that neatly integrates graphics with text

Interactive Fiction (formerly referred to as Text Adventures) are a cross between reading a book and playing a game, where you control the main character. Rather than reading the story from start to finish, you interact with everything by typing commands at a prompt, discovering things as you go along. Well written games give you, the player, the impression that anything you type is understood by giving a sensible and meaningful response. Indeed, part of the fun of playing interactive fiction games is discovering responses to things you didn't expect to have been catered for.

Most interactive fiction follows the same basic rules - these include walking from location to location using compass directions (north, east, south-west etc). You can normally pick objects up, drop them, put them on things, talk to characters, push things and much more. This handy sheet for beginners explains many common commands used in games.

Among the many technologies poised to reshape the way we communicate and interact with the world around us, few evoke the same sense of excitement and curiosity as augmented reality. Best known as the technology behind the visual overlays on televised sports games and Google's much-hyped Project Glass, AR seems intriguing and futuristic, if a bit lacking in practical uses for the average consumer. The same holds true in education, where, until recently, its impact on the curriculum of even the most tech-savvy districts has been limited to somewhat primitive efforts like QR codes.

But AR's promise is enormous. In the 2012 K-12 edition of the Horizon Report, which examines a wealth of data to predict which ed tech trends will develop into mainstream successes, the New Media Consortium (NMC) named augmented reality an emerging technology with "significant potential" to transform K-12 education. The report anticipated widespread adoption in four to five years. Yet, for many K-12 educators who are just now exploring how web 2.0 and mobile technologies fit into their classroom, AR isn't a priority, primarily because its application to education still seems theoretical to most teachers.