A research team, led by North Carolina State University's Dr. Mitzi M. Montoya, has developed a new way of measuring how "real" online virtual worlds are – an important advance for the emerging technology that can be used to foster development of new training and collaboration applications by companies around the world.

Second Life, a virtual world created in 2003, currently boasts more than 12 million users worldwide who go there for everything from college recruiting to shopping. Now, Penn State researchers are investigating how virtual teams can better solve real world problems by collaborating in Second Life.

Americans are spending increasing amounts of time hanging around virtual worlds in the forms of cartoon-like avatars that change appearances according to users' wills, fly through floating cities in the clouds and teleport instantly to glowing crystal canyons and starlit desert landscapes.

Purdue University is operating a virtual environment that enables scientists and engineers to interpret raw data collected with powerful instruments called dynamic atomic force microscopes.

Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life®, and IBM (NYSE:IBM) have successfully demonstrated virtual world interoperability by teleporting avatars between the Second Life Preview Grid and an OpenSim virtual world server.

When Stanford computer scientist Vladlen Koltun decided to build a better virtual world, he began with 3-D trees—millions of them. Now he wants to give them away.

Instant messaging is a great way to avoid embarrassing face-to-face confrontations for teens. More than four in 10, or 43 percent, of U.S. teens who instant message use it for things they wouldn't say in person, according to an Associated Press-AOL poll released Thursday.

Kaneva, a rapidly growing digital world for the masses, today announced at the Virtual Worlds Conference that it has standardized on IBM (NYSE: IBM) servers to support consumers worldwide who want to blend social networking and entertainment in an immersive 3D environment.

It happens in school, at work, physically, verbally, even by email and text - now researchers at The University of Nottingham say there's no escape in the virtual world.