Sweden was planning to open the first "diplomatic representation" in the virtual reality of web-based Second Life on 30 May 2007.

However the tiny country of The Maldives (pop. less than 300,000) has pipped Sweden to the post by unveiling the world's first virtual embassy in Second Life just days before the Scandinavian country's planned launch.

Stewart Gibbon from the Maldives Mission in Geneva explained "I suppose it's nice to be first but this was not a deliberate attempt to beat Sweden to it".

As at May 2007 there are around 6,500,000 residents living in the alternative reality of Second Life - over twenty times the population of the Maldives.

See also: http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/882087.htm

The new IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics had its first committee meeting in March 2007, and began discussions around a new journal.  The meeting minutes detail the proposal.

The scope statement says:

The proposed journal, to be called Transactions on Haptics, will address the science, technology and applications associated with information acquisition and object manipulation through touch. Haptic interactions relevant to this journal include all aspects of manual exploration and manipulation by humans, machines, and interactions between the two, performed in real, virtual, teleoperated, or networked environments.

Once they get the planning phases completed, they intend to launch sometime in 2008 with 4 issues / year.

During our startup phase, we propose to do several thematic issues, each with an invited paper from a key researcher, both to underscore our scope and encourage submissions – e.g.

• Advances in perception
• Haptic interface design and control
• Software rendering for haptic and multimodal interactions
• Applications and haptic interaction design
• Rehabilitation, Medicine, Neuroscience…

For more information:  http://www.worldhaptics.org/index.htm

This is it! We have completed the port of our links database on the new site.

 
Image from http://www.toytester.com/?p=143

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