You’ve heard of power walking, but “power dreaming?” That practice’s usually the stuff of Buddhism, and now, could go a long way towards mending the psychic wounds of our nation’s bravest. With about 52% of PTSD-affected veterans reported as having disturbing nightmares, the U.S. Army’s working towards a virtual solution that’d marry the design of Second Life with laptop-displayed or 3D head-mounted, physio-emotional healing. The project, a form of biofeedback therapy which would create custom, stress-alleviating imagery for traumatized vets, is currently in the planning stage with Washington State’s Naval Hospital serving as its experimental base. Over half a million in funding’s already been put towards the effort which is expected to launch in full next year. And when it does, we’re hoping the tech resembles a certain Strange Days SQUID recorder — with happy thoughts, o’course.

U.S. Army urges vets to get outta their dreams and into the virtual world originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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But while it’s still unclear what Ondrejka and his co-founder Bruce Rogers were working on at the time, at least we know what they’re working on today: boosting Facebook’s support for HTML5 games. In a post on Facebook, Ondrejka writes that he and Rogers have spent the past few months pushing the boundaries of HTML5 for games:

Already over 125 million people visit Facebook using HTML5 capable browsers just from their mobile phones, and that number skyrockets when we add in desktop browsers. The future is clear…

Less clear are the capabilities of HTML5 as a high performance gaming platform today. New HTML5 games regularly appear, they often exhibit quirks and low frame rates.

The first fruits of their labor are for programmers only: a benchmarking kit called JSGameBench that should help developers enhance performance and understand how to create more complex HTML5 games.

That’s an important area for Facebook, which wants to make sure it is the top destination for people playing games. It’s already apparent that companies can build themselves into big businesses thanks to Facebook, but not everybody can boast social-gaming giant Zynga’s resources. Better games all around makes the pie bigger for Facebook, particularly when it requires payments to go through its own systems.

This isn’t because Facebook wants to make games, though. In fact, Ondrejka explicitly says in the post that is “definitely not” in the plan. But it’s clearly in the company’s interest to make the games it supports better and richer for players. More play equals more money.

What’s particularly interesting about this open-source approach, however, is that such developments have implications beyond Facebook. With proper browser support, mobiles can use HTML5 instead of Flash for some tasks, meaning that Apple, Google and others can all benefit from Facebook’s push. And while 3-D may not be so easy (“the HTML5 sweet spot is going to be 2-D and isometric games,” he writes) there’s still plenty that can be done right now.

So now it starts to become more apparent why Facebook bought Walletin and brought in Ondrejka. Whatever you think of Second Life, it’s an astonishing feat of engineering that makes it work, and one he created. Applying those abilities to web-based games may mean we’ll be seeing a lot of very rapid development in the near future.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Joi Ito on Flickr

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A Mobile Payments Glossary
• The Real Impact of Facebook’s New Approach to Gaming
• Report: Virtual Goods for the Enterprise Market

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World of Warcraft turns 5-years-old today. Back on November 23, 2004, a year before the current generation of video game systems even began (with the launch of the Xbox 360), Blizzard released the massively multi-player online game at a time when massively multi-player online games were still largely the haunt of hardcore gamers, people with fast Internet connections who were willing to pay $15 per month for access to a game that they already bought. Who can forget the message board threads: Why do I have to pay for a game that I already paid for at the store? How do you beat the game? What happens if and when I stop playing?

You won’t stop playing. Five years in, Blizzard has 11.5 million (as of December, 2008) subscribers all over the world. (Note: Not every region of the world has a pay-per-month regime. You pay by the hour in China, for example.) In these five years, the game has gone from plucky upstart, going up against other, well-established MMOGs, to the undisputed number one such game. Now, that may not necessarily be a good thing, but it’s hard to see someone knocking World of Warcraft off its perch. Well, someone other than World of Warcraft II.

I’m a veteran of vanilla WoW, but only just. I bought the game in September, 2006; The Burning Crusade came out a few months later. I bought the game because I was roped into some consulting session for a rather big company. “Hey, you’re young. Play WoW and Second Life and tell us how we can better reach young people through them.”

I don’t know if the company got what it wanted (surely it didn’t!), but it certainly set me on my current path of, oh, you know, playing the game for at least three to four hours per night on most nights of the week.

It’s pretty funny. When the game launched in 2004, I was a freshman in college, and one of my two roommates was all about the game. We’re talking stay-up-until-4am-every-night-of-the-week-to-play-it. I had no idea what the game was about, but I distinctly remember the day he walked into the dorm room with a box from Amazon: “Gentlemen, it’s here.” (Actually, knowing the kid, it was probably more along the lines of, “Yes, it’s here! Fucking A~!” Memory fades, I’m afraid.) I’m like, so what? Can’t you see we’re playing Halo 2? (Halo 2 was very big that year. I was a good sniper. It was the last time I played a multi-player game with any conviction.) I’d say we teased my roommate about his “addiction,” but I had no idea what the game was about. I had never played any of the other Warcraft games, nor Diablo. Again, I was not, and still am not, a PC gamer, so the entire Blizzard catalogue played no role in my life.

The point is, the game’s launch came and went, but my only experience with it was waking up at 3:00AM because my roommate yelled, “Yes! I can buy a mount now!”

Then September of 2006 rolls around, and I’m forced to buy the game for that aforementioned consulting session. I still had no interest in the game, and was only creating an account as part of my job. (Well, “job” only in the loosest sense of the word, getting paid to try to help a huge company better tap into the “young people” market.) So walk back to my room from the local Best Buy (I wasn’t boycotting it back then. You can listen to my ordeal as told on the podcast here.), and install it on my iMac. I create an account, and create my first character. It was an Undead Warrior named Rocktober—Undead because I thought they looked (and still look) the best, and Warrior because, well, Warrior is the noob class, right? “Warrior? I bet you get a sword and stuff. Count me in.”

I still have that character to this day.

I then set aside Rocktober, and created a Night Elf Warrior on a different server so I could play with a friend of mine. (I had casually mentioned that I was playing WoW now, and he flipped out. “Oh, dude, join my server and I’ll hook you up.”) I named the Nelf Warrior Zardoz, in honor of that godawful Sean Connery moviethat I had just seen in a movie class I was forced to take. (We all needed an “art” class, so to speak, and watching and critiquing movies was considered “art.” Fair enough.) I was able to get Zardoz all the way up to level 58—it was harder to level in those days—before growing bored of the game. The Burning Crusade was installed somewhere around this time.

A year went by without me really playing the game. Note that I was still paying for the game, just not playing it. I don’t know, I guess I never bothered to cancel my subscription. Maybe it was too much of a hassle, or maybe I didn’t notice such a small amount of money leaving my bank account every month. The point is, I’ve been paying my $15 per month non-stop since September, 2006.

I’m probably never going to stop paying, either.

So here’s to another five years (well, three years in my case) of unpredictable PUGs, guilds joined but not really participated in, Auctioneer-assisted money-making, and lost sleep. So much lost sleep.

My personal favorite? The “How to Infuriate Other Members” of the Mac Zealots Cult: “Write an honest, negative tech review about an Apple product [or service, for that matter].”

Post from: The Gadget Blog

A slide from a Bryant & Stratton College gallery of the upcoming graduation ceremony at its virtual campus in Second Life.

(Credit: Bryant & Stratton College)

It’s the time of year for college graduations–students don caps and gowns, degrees are conferred, and commencement speakers stir …

We liked it in the Ford Flex and in the Lincoln MKS, and its capabilities are constantly expanding. I have a feeling that even if Ford were to collapse and disappear, we’d still see a lot of Sync going around.

So who got the magic millionth vehicle? Steve Ballmer. Give me a break, doesn’t that guy have enough cars already? Well, hopefully if he’ll drive his new car to work instead of taking that private jet and save some gas. The Microsoft commute is murder. They should move the whole company over to Second Life — now that would save some gas.

Thats equal to 28,539 years. If we put those minutes end-on-end and launched them back into the mists of time, they’d reach the Pleistocene era – then they’d probably get eaten by a giant sloth, or Madonna – zing! The success of VOIP in Second Life is marked by the fact 50% of Second Lifers, including educators, consumers and large enterprises use voice in their everyday in-world activity. More interesting though, is the annoucment that Linden Labs, the white-coats behind the Second Life experience, are lauching a service called AVLine which allows people to make calls from a landline to a user in Second Life, and users to make calls out of Second Life to a landline – to a non-Second Life user. “We’re launching a beta-testing programme today with the full service launching later this year,” said Linden Labs. Does anyone else feel like the lines are starting to blur? Does anyone else feel pretty excited? Does that arouse anyone else? No? Just me then.

Thats equal to 28,539 years. If we put those minutes end-on-end and launched them back into the mists of time, they’d reach the Pleistocene era – then they’d probably get eaten by a giant sloth, or Madonna – zing! The success of VOIP in Second Life is marked by the fact 50% of Second Lifers, including educators, consumers and large enterprises use voice in their everyday in-world activity. More interesting though, is the annoucment that Linden Labs, the white-coats behind the Second Life experience, are lauching a service called AVLine which allows people to make calls from a landline to a user in Second Life, and users to make calls out of Second Life to a landline – to a non-Second Life user. “We’re launching a beta-testing programme today with the full service launching later this year,” said Linden Labs. Does anyone else feel like the lines are starting to blur? Does anyone else feel pretty excited? Does that arouse anyone else? No? Just me then.