Flying to the moon - Teleporting across virtual worlds

"Staff of Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM announced last night that they have achieved the first recorded teleport of their avatars from one virtual world into another. Researchers from the two companies teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world." This could be the beginning of a real interaction between virtual worlds and make it possible for many of the millions of users/avatars to experience other virtual environments.

"While unaffiliated parties have created versions of this process before, Linden says theirs is the first effort to achieve trans-world teleportation without logging out of one world and logging in to the other. No virtual goods were transported across the barrier, a major concern for Second Lifers concerned with virtual property theft and rapid depreciation of their assets' value." (from Linden Labs reported in Read Write Web

Journal of Virtual worlds

Here is the link to the journal

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

This looks to be a very useful source of research in VW:

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research has just launched its first issue. "JVWR is an online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research."

Vol 1, No 1: Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present and Future. This is the inaugural edition of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research and is published by the Texas Digital Library with Jeremy Kemp editor.

Chapters that interest me include:

• Toward a definition of virtual worlds
• Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres
• A Typology of Virtual Worlds: Historical Overview and Future Directions
• Virtual communities - exchanging ideas through computer bulletin boards
• 3D3C Real Virtual Worlds Defined: The Immense Potential of Merging 3D, Community, Creation, and Commerce
• How Open Source Software Will Affect Virtual Worlds

2nd Issue: Social Identity and Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds
3rd Issue: Culture of Virtual Worlds

Well done Jeremy for getting this going