Articles Posted in Virtual World IP Policies

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Three Wire Systems, LLC recently announced its VetAdvisor Virtual Room (VVR) won the U.S. Army Simulation & Training Technology Center’s Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge for best collaboration in a virtual world by a government contractor. The award was presented on the final day of the Defense GameTech Users’ Conference in Orlando on March 31.

Three Wire’s VetAdvisor Virtual Room is an expansion of the successful VetAdvisor Support Program with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, which offers telehealth and virtual health delivery platforms for veteran mental health care. The program is designed to provide support when and where the veteran chooses, thus supporting the Veteran Centered Medical Home Care Model.

Providing a secure meeting place for veterans and Care Coaches (licensed behavior health professionals) to interact, the VetAdvisor Virtual Room features avatars representing both the veterans and Care Coaches.

This tool is just one of a growing list of virtual world technologies used by government agencies.

Pillsbury’s Virtual Worlds team is proud to assist Three Wire on this and other projects.

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This article from Slate.com provides an interesting discussion regarding the applicability of virtual worlds and MMORPGs to economics research. One of the things the article points out is that research in the real world must handle inevitable data loss – making calculations like GDP the result of estimates and approximations – while every transaction in a virtual world is tracked without error. Although some researchers are skeptical about the ability of virtual world economies to mirror the real world, the point of the article is that research tools like rat mazes and petri dishes don’t model the real world, either. What those tools provide are environments where basic principles of a given activity can be examined, so those general principles can be extrapolated and applied to the real world. Virtual worlds have an additional advantage for researchers and policymakers – the “laws” in the form of the terms of service and the general rules of the world, are both more simplistic than the real world and more malleable – making them a research tool for the intersection of law and economics, as well.