AP reports that an RPI group is developing a robot for Second Life, Researchers teach ‘Second Life’ avatar to think. Actually, it’s a robot with the brain of a four-year old pre-schooler.

“Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world. But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.”

There’s more information in an article on Virtual World News. Apparently the goal is not to build interesting Second Life Bots using a variety of hacks, but to demonstrate human-like behaviour using more principled techniques.

“RPI is looking, initially, at a “theory of mind” for children, specifically with a false-belief test. In the real world, a child (age 4) would be shown a person placing a teddy bear in a cabinet. When the first person leaves, a second person would move the bear to another spot, like a refrigerator. When asked where the first person will look for the bear, they usually answer with the refrigerator due to a lack of understanding of other people. In Second Life, an automated theorem prover and procedures for converting conversational English into formal logic make up the brain of “Eddie,” the four-year-old avatar. When posed the above problem, Eddie responded as the human child would.”

Here’s a video of Eddie in action.

Today’s Baltimore Sun has a good page-one story, Video games, from scratch, on the new UMBC games, animation and interactive media programs. The reporter visited the Anatomy of a Video Game which is being taught by Katie Hirsch (UMBC CS/ART ‘05). As luck would have it, another UMBC alumnus, Eric Jordan (UMBC CS ‘07), was also there giving a guest lecture. Both Katie and Eric work at Breakaway, one of the many Baltimore area game companies. The course includes students who are majoring in visual arts ans well as those majoring in computer science, making an interesting mix that mirrors the teams that create commercial computer games. The article has some good quotes from both the instructors and students and from Professor Marc Olano, who directs the computer science game program.

This Spring UMBC will mount our first “regular” undergraduate class as part of its new programs on games, animation and interactive media. The class, Anatomy of a Video Game, will be taught by UMBC Alumna Katie Hirsch, who graduated with dual degrees in Computer Science and Visual Arts and who works at and Breakaway Games in Hunt Valley MD.

“This class dissects the process of developing a video game from an introductory perspective. The class will give artist and programmers an opportunity to focus on their specific areas of interest within the development pipeline while learning to work across their disciplines. The class will include production and design as well as art and programming specific topics.”

This course, as well as several others this spring, will take advantage of UMBC’s new GAIM Lab that is equipped with a generous gift of 20 Xbox consoles from Microsoft.

Alternate reality games, also known as immersive games, blend fantasy and reality in ways that blur the difference. We are not talking about virtual reality technology that require their users to don special helmets or use kinematic effectors, but games that embed their narratives and interact with players using everyday aspects of the the real world — Web sites, email, instant messages, phone calls, letters and billboards.

The genre has largely been used by conceptual artists, advertising agencies and marketeers. Here’s how Dave Szulborski describes it on his This is Not a Game site.

“Alternate Reality Gaming, sometimes also called Immersive Gaming, Viral Marketing, or Interactive Fiction, is a rapidly emerging genre of online gaming and is one of the first true art and entertainment forms that was developed from and exclusively for the Internet. Alternate Reality Games have been wildly successful when used for multimillion dollar marketing campaigns, such as the 2004 game I Love Bees, used by Microsoft to help launch the hugely anticipated X-Box video game Halo 2, and the game that started it all, the Beast, used to promote Steven Spielberg’s science fiction epic A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 2001.”

Wired has an article, Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games, that describes an a viral marketing campaign to promote Nine Inch Nails. Muhammad Saleem blogs about the online viral marketing campaign it used to promote the move The Dark Knight. Finally, ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post, Alternate Reality Games: What Makes or Breaks Them? that attempts to deconstruct ARGs.

Alternate reality gaming is definitely unusual, but it draws on many of the skills any student of gaming should be developing: the ability to construct a rich narrative, the capability to design an environment that reveals itself as players explore and gradually discover and solve underlying puzzles, and the skills to exploit the latest digital technologies.

Many of them are inherently social games as well, encouraging or even requiring groups of people to collaborate and share information to unravel the story.