STOCKHOLM, May 30 /PRNewswire/ — Second House of Sweden - Sweden’s embassy in the virtual world of Second Life - has opened its doors to the public. Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt this morning cut the ribbon at an inauguration ceremony Broadcast simultaneously to press conferences in Stockholm and in Budapest.(

Second House of Sweden is inspired by the real-life House of Sweden in Washington, D.C., which houses the Embassy of Sweden to the United States.
The setting for the virtual embassy is the picturesque Stockholm Archipelago.Inside and around the Second House of Sweden there is a wealth of exhibits and information. Some examples:

- A recreation of Raoul Wallenberg’s office in Budapest, with a
re-enactment of his last day of freedom on January 16, 1945. (In cooperation with the OSA Archivum in Budapest)

- An art exhibit, curated by Nationalmuseum in Stockholm

- Royalty-free images of Sweden, fact sheets about politics, industry,
design, art as well as virtual Swedish food, with real recipes attached

- Throughout the region, listen to Radio Sweden’s daily news podcasts in English

- Furniture by Swedish wood manufacturers and IKEA - some of which
visitors can use to furnish their virtual homes in Second Life.

Second House of Sweden has already generated great interest both in Sweden and abroad, according to Stefan Geens, project leader at the Swedish Institute: “Now that we have a platform in Second Life to promote the culture and lifestyle of Sweden, many Swedish companies and organizations are interested in collaborating.

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From a DMO point of view probably the most innovative move I have seen in 10 years or so, from a pure marketing standpoint a very dubious move. I’ll check back in a year. You can however see that virtual worlds are getting to be more than a hype for business promotional purposes. I love the Swedes for their boldness in taking this first step especially for the purposes of export and tourism promotion where are the followers to create the trend?

Here is another fine example of how Second Life could offer a channel for advertisers and the entertainment industry. Doppelganger Inc. has just launched Tyra’s Virtual Studio.The agency Doppelganger develops avatar-based virtual worlds, the first of which was the contained virtual world ‘The Music Lounge’.

Tyra Banks is a ex miss America and national celebrity in the US as host of the popular show ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and her own talk show.

It is a virtual world where your cell shaded avatar can hang out and get insider information on the Tyra Banks Show. The virtual world recreates the set of Tyra’s talk show, and features “exclusive events like fierce runway challenges.” It is worthwhile to check out the website which offers more information on the events planned in the contained virtual studio.

Cognitive intelligence is really still something which is far on the horizon but this project certainly gives a good glimpse into the future where media may literally be materialized into a cognitive form.

MIRAGE is an embodied, graphical agent that can communicate with users about real and virtual objects in the user’s environment. A user enters the augmented reality room and puts on the “magic glasses”. Through the glasses the user can still see the room, but superimposed is now the floating graphical image of MIRAGE.

The room that MIRAGE lives in is fitted with trackers that make Mirage appear to be stationary in a particular location in the room, and as the user walks around, Mirage can follow the user with its gaze. Mirage can answer questions about real objects in the room posed by the user, and can perceive pointing gestures by the user, enabling questions such as “what is that [pointing at an arbitrary object]?”, “who is logged in on that machine [pointing at a computer in the room]?”. MIRAGE also has a direct feed to on-line news information that is automatically generated by natural language algorithms every night, allowing users to ask for the latest news.

In the future we hope that technology similar to MIRAGE will be used to teach operators of power plants and take people on guided museum tours, as well as tours of caves and historical sites.

This project was done as part of a graduate computer science course at Columbia University, using the modular A.I. engineering principles of Constructionist A.I.

Kris Thorisson, H.Benko, D.Abramov, A.O.Arnold, S.Maskey, A.Vaseekaran

When I saw this it was as if a few really big things came together for me. Here we have an example of a few things I know agencies have been trying to pull off for the past year. The combination text to speech, streaming flash video, avatars all put togetherat Northwestern University’s InfoLab. I am not going to dwell on the basic elemen,ts because if you have been reading my blog regularly you know where to get those parts and if I may add of significant better quality.

The real innovation here is the ability to dynamically generate a virtual newscast on a specific topic using a podcast broadcasting, transferring text data to speech.

Trendhunter adds an example for use: “Imagine the immediate potential of virtually collected, produced & packaged content for Second Life and other virtual social networks. Additionally, consumer use could lead to a complete redefinition of what it means to have a personal RSS Reader.”

Although I do not think we are waiting around for a new personal RSS reader I do think that the novelty effect would work well within an integrated media strategy.

At TWESTC we like to know we are ahead of a trend. Pitchview confirms our opinion that there are some opportunities out there and therefore I am not too reluctant to share their views.
“Wij zijn in 2007 gestart met een nieuwe dienst: Online Network Marketing. De unit die zich hiermee gaat bezighouden specialiseert zich in marketing in sociale netwerken. Steeds meer organisaties zijn actief in online netwerken zoals Second Life, LinkedIn en Hyves. Denk aan ABN AMRO, met een vestiging in Second Life, en H&M, dat door meer dan 40.000 mensen op Hyves genoemd wordt als favoriet merk. Wij denken dat sociale netwerken het platform van de toekomst zijn! We gaan u helpen het publiek te bereiken van User Generated Content-sites zoals MySpace, Flickr of YouTube. We brengen u in contact met uw doelgroep in sociale platformen als Second Life, LinkedIn of zelfs Schoolbank.nl. We vertellen u wat er in de weblogs over u geschreven wordt. We willen samen met u deze nieuwe wereld veroveren. We doen dit op een innovatieve manier. We combineren onze technische expertise met de jonge honden van bijvoorbeeld de mashup wedstrijd. We maken daarbij gebruik van al het mooie dat het nieuwe web ons te bieden heeft. Voor vragen kunt u terecht bij Paul de Gooijer via paul.de.gooijer@tamtam.nl. Op 31 januari 2007 organiseert Tam Tam een twee uur sessie met als thema ‘Uw bedrijf in Second Life’.”