Long Before Virtuality, Another Star Trek Alum Tried To Get Edgy With The Holodeck

Melinda Snodgrass is best known for writing the Star Trek episode where Data's personhood gets put on trial. But in the mid-1990s, she created Star Command, which took Trek's holodeck much, much further. Just check out this holo-torture sequence. Edgy! More »

Win Fame and Prizes in Our Scifi Sims Contest

With The Sims 3 hitting the shelves, it's time to take your avatars to the place they've always belonged: outer space. Or maybe inner space. We want you to turn your Sims games into science fiction masterpieces and win prizes. More »

Scientists Create Method Of Uploading Your Entire Body To A Computer

Not simply content with developing technology to one day allow you to upload your brain, scientists are working to upload and re-create your entire anatomy into a computer. Who needs this "real life" stuff, anyway? More »

Travel Inside The Horrifying Mind Of A Cyborg Killer, In "Offline"

A rogue scientist goes inside the mind of a cyber-soldier to try and reprogram him and redeem his humanity, in the independent film Offline, from director Matthew Santoro. The trailer, featuring stark dystopian visuals and nightmarish distortions, is below. More »

Indie Science Fiction Film Tackles Virtual Reality And The War On Terror

The upcoming indie science fiction film In-World War combines a DIY ethic, virtual reality, the War on Terror, and the loss of identity into a globetrotting dark comedy. Ah, so that's where all the originality in movie-making went. More »

How To React To Your VR Environment

How convincing is virtual reality? To our conscious mind, not at all (Seriously, have you seen Second Life?), but to our subconsciousnesses? Well, it depends how real everyone else thinks it is, apparently. More »

Win Fame And Prizes In Our Scifi Sims Contest

With The Sims 3 hitting the shelves, it's time to take your avatars to the place they've always belonged: outer space. Or maybe inner space. Or maybe just a post-apocalyptic world. The point is, we want you to turn your The Sims games into science fiction masterpieces and win prizes. More »

Second Life Embraces Corporate America, But Is It Mutual?

Second Life! It's not just for cybersex anymore... or, at least, that's what Linden Labs is trying to tell the various corporations of the world, as they try to reposition their virtual domain as the latest and greatest way to commute virtually to the office. More »

Can Ray Kurzweil's Rosy Predictions Stand Up To Fact-Checking?

When the Singularity arrives in 2045, Ray Kurzweil will finally be infallible. Until, then, however the famous futurist's meat brain has made some ludicrously inaccurate predictions, as Newsweek magazine pointed out recently. Kurzweil has sent an angry letter to the magazine, to try and clear his name. More »

Second Life Foresaw the US Banking Crisis

Yet another financial casualty: Citigroup just became the latest institution to come crawling to the feds for a bailout. Where will it all end? As industry experts become desperate for any kind of divining rod, some observers pointed out that the failure of unregulated banking has already played out — in Second Life. The rise and fall of one of the virtual world’s unregulated banks has some financial researchers taking a closer look at the predictive benefit of virtual environments. More »

Did Somebody Hack Your Virtual Breasts?

I can't stop thinking about a story that broke earlier this week about a bug that reduced the breast sizes of tons of large-boobed avatars in the MMO "Age of Conan" (you can see before and after pictures here). No word on whether the boobs have been re-inflated, nor any real explanation of how it happened beyond some hand-waving about patches and "morph values" for body parts. My theory is that it was actually a gang of feminist modders who infected the MMO with properly-sized boobies. [Kotaku]

Virtual Worlds as Test Tube Societies

Though you may never visit Second Life, you know about it for the same reason you know about MySpace: it's a digital social space that's transforming how we use the web. Except instead of being a bunch of webpages devoted to bad music and OMG WTF, Second Life is a 3D virtual world where people build crazy houses, transform into dragons, and talk a lot about the Metaverse in scary marketing terms. It's something you need to understand, and luckily there's a new book that can explain it all to you. Second Life "embedded journalist" Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life hit bookstores last month, and it's one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive books out there on the topic. (That's Au above, in his Second Life incarnation.) More »

Do Virtual Worlds Have to Make You a Psycho Loser?

A new documentary about virtual worlds called Second Skin debuted at the South by Southwest Festival over the weekend, and it's already causing controversy for portraying gamers as social defectives. Though the filmmakers clearly want to offer a positive view of massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, they nevertheless managed to focus the documentary almost entirely on people whose immersion in virtual worlds destroys their engagement with the real world. Either that, or the relationships that the gamers form via the virtual world are shown to be unstable and perhaps even illusory. C|Net's Daniel Terdiman wrote a fascinating essay about the movie after its debut, pointing out how strange it is that we're still getting these one-sided portraits of the "loser gamer" despite the fact that gaming is fast becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the world. More »

Science Fiction Kills Fantasy in Video Games

Some of the most popular online video games and virtual worlds have fantasy themes — think World of Warcraft or old-school MMO Everquest. But if games are ever to make it out of the dork ghetto, they're going to have to shed their elves and orcs and start giving us more spaceships and high tech. So says Michael Zenke, who blogs about games at MMOG Nation. He says science fiction games (like Tabula Rasa, pictured here) will always beat fantasy in terms of storytelling potential. Zenke bolsters his argument with two interesting points: that science fiction is usually based in reality, and therefore is more appealing to a mass audience; and that science fiction has a much more hopeful outlook than fantasy. Realism and hope just make for better gameplay. More »

Virtual Worlds Are So 1994

Sometimes an idea is ahead of its time and backward thinking represses it. Other times, an idea is very much stuck in its own time but can't be realized due to crappy technology. Such is the case with virtual worlds, an idea that captured people's imaginations at the dawn of the Web in the early 1990s. At that time, people dreamed that "the future" would be all VR — just like in Lawnmower Man, or Total Recall. But our digital forebears didn't have the computer power to make that happen. Now that we have that power, using it to recreate a dream from the Rave Age puts virtual world companies like Linden Lab and Metaverse in the ashcan of history. More »

Second Life Avatars Are Portable As Purse Dogs Now

As the Virtual Worlds conference kicked off in Silicon Valley yesterday, IBM announced a partnership with Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, to create portable avatars that you can bring with you to any virtual world. But how? IBM and Linden Lab say they are developing open data formats, or a "universal character creation system," that will let people use their Second Life avatars anywhere. The problem is that most virtual world companies like Blizzard, which owns World of Warcraft, have very strict rules about what your avatar can look like. Same goes for things like the Barbie virtual world. You can't just bring your trippy Burning Man avatar from Second Life into a WOW campaign and slay dragons with your powers of fashion and relating deeply to other people. And I doubt the Barbie world people will welcome your naked sex god avatar. More »