From the Virtalis website: "NATIONAL Grid has embarked on a voyage of virtual discovery. It has installed a StereoWorks system from Virtalis, Europe’s leading Virtual Reality (VR) Company.

This Design News article reports that with Simulink 3D Animation, engineers can visually observe the dynamic behavior of systems as part of the design process. From the article: "Responding to the growing demand among engineers to visually observe the dynamic behavior of the systems they're designing, The MathWorks has released Simulink 3D Animation.

The software, an upgraded version of a product formerly known as Virtual Reality Toolbox, provides an interface between the MATLAB environment and Simulink multidomain simulation platform and virtual reality graphics. As a result, engineers and scientists can dynamically simulate their mechanical products and control systems in a 3-D virtual reality environment, giving them a more realistic view of their offering.

From this ScienceDaily article : "Despite advances in computer graphics, few people would think virtual characters or objects are real. Yet placed in a virtual reality environment most people will interact with them as if they are really there. European researchers are finding out why.

In trying to understand presence – the propensity of humans to respond to fake stimuli as if they are real – the researchers are not just gaining insights into how the human brain functions. They are also learning how to create more intense and realistic virtual experiences, opening the door to myriad applications for healthcare, training, social research and entertainment.

From Positive Technology Journal : "Testing the effects of educational strategies on comprehension of a genomic concept using virtual reality" Patient Educ Couns. 2009 Apr 29; Authors: Kaphingst KA, Persky S, McCall C, Lachance C, Loewenstein J, Beall AC, Blascovich J

OBJECTIVE: Applying genetic susceptibility information to improve health will likely require educating patients about abstract concepts, for which there is little existing research. This experimental study examined the effect of learning mode on comprehension of a genomic concept.

From this 24dash.com article : "The macho world of construction isn’t the most obvious place to look for a new approach to people skills training. Yet ‘soft skills’ such as the ability to communicate clearly and inspire a team are as critical to the success of any building project as technical expertise.

A new construction training centre – the ACT-UK Simulation Centre - set to open in Coventry in September 2009 will help construction managers develop their people management skills and enable them to fully develop their potential through a pioneering combination of virtual reality computer techniques and the use of professional actors. The ACT-UK Simulation Centre is backed by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) and leading construction companies, including Balfour Beatty.

From this ScienceDaily article : "For the past two years, a team of UCLA Egyptologists, digital modelers, web designers, staff and students has been building a three-dimensional virtual-reality model of the ancient Egyptian religious site known as Karnak, one of the largest temple complexes ever constructed.

The result is Digital Karnak, a high-tech model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate 2,000 years of history at the popular ancient Egyptian tourist site near modern-day Luxor, where generations of pharaohs constructed temples, chapels, obelisks, sphinxes, shrines and other sacred structures beginning in the 20th century B.C.

From this ScienceDaily article: "The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT just presented an Augmented Reality system for use under water. A diver's mask with a special display lets the diver see his or her real submarine surroundings overlaid with computer-generated virtual scenes.

In the pilot application, an AR game, the player sees a coral reef with shoals, mussels and weeds, instead of a plain indoor pool. Applications for professional divers are being investigated.

From this BBC News article: "The 3D web moved closer to reality as Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, joined forces with graphics consortium Khronos. Khronos has set up a working group to create a standard for what it calls accelerated 3D graphics on the web. It could lead to widespread browser-based gaming as well as creating 3D environments in social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The aim is to produce a first public version within a year.

This ZDNet article talks about a haptic jacket lined with vibration motors that influences emotional immersion. From the article: "Imagine watching Apocalypto and feeling the pounding heart of the escaping protagonist tribesman on your own chest? That’s now possible with a haptic jacket lined with vibration motors that researchers demoed at last week’s IEEE-sponsored 2009 World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City.

The jacket, created by Philips Electronics, is meant to study the effects of touch on a movie viewer’s emotional response to what the characters are experiencing. It is not meant to translate blows like kicks and punches, although it can simulate outside forces. Their goal is to investigate emotional immersion.

From the OpenSceneGraph website: "PERTHSHIRE, Scotland - 12th February 2009 - OpenSceneGraph Professional Services announces the release of OpenSceneGraph 2.8, the industry's leading open-source scene graph technology, designed to accelerate application development and improve 3D graphics performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.8 written entirely in Standard C++ and built upon OpenGL, offers developers working in the visual simulation, game development, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modeling markets - a real-time visualization tool which eclipses commercial scene graph toolkits in functionality, stability and performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.8 runs on all Microsoft Windows platforms, Apple OS/X, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems."