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A Thursday-afternoon panel at Supernova looked at the significance of games in business. Led by Dan Hunter of the Wharton School (and, of course, the Terra Nova blog, the panel also included Charles Moore of Reuters, Amy Jo Kim of Shufflebrain, Michael Zyda of the USC Gamepipe Lab, and Doug Failor of the Department of Defense’s Joint Futures Lab. Among the hot topics were blue-haired ladies and something called “the G word,” as panelists sought to explain how some of the lessons we could learn from games could be used in commercial and enterprise applications. (more…)

The EmSense Corporation gave a rather unexpected demo at Supernova today. EmSense makes a glasses-like headset that “senses your emotions,” according to the company. The headset reads biofeedback signals, apparently with some degree of accuracy. A video shown at Supernova demonstrated a player who could go into stealth mode when he held his breath in order to cross a minefield. Graphs of adrenalin and focus showed what the headset could read while a player was navigating the first particularly startling scene of Doom 3. Another mini-game allowed a player to cross a bridge as long as he was focusing on the task, but caused him to fall into a chasm when he lost focus. Avatars could also be made to blink their eyes when the player did. Training and education applications were demo’d as well. The slim headset is still rather obtrusive compared to how light it will eventually need to be, but it seems like things are on the way. There’s gotta be a ton of potential applications. I’m definitely buying any game where I can go into stealth mode just by thinking sneaky, anyway.

Does the Internet need a new scientific discipline? That was the contention of Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!’s chief data officer and senior vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions, who spoke about “the new science of the Internet” at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today.

“The Internet touches all of our lives, almost every aspect of our lives,” he said. “And yet, when you really ask what these things mean — what does community mean? what does it take to make a community thrive, or whither? what does it take to establish trust on the Internet? — these are questions that are all really fuzzy, and what you find when you dig into them as a scientist is that there’s no science behind them. What can we do to fish ourselves out of the dark?” (more…)

Real estate maps mashups were one of the first user-generated tools for apps like Google Maps. Now Century 21, the world’s largest real estate sales organization, has a mashup of its own, based in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and MapPoint, according to a press release. Century 21’s Property Search Gold lets prospective home-buyers browse sale properties on a satellite map based on their own search criteria. Not a hugely exciting new class of application, but interesting to see a big company buy into this kind of mashup on a big scale.

IBM exec Linda Sanford gave a big shout-out to “the gaming generation” today at the Supernova conference in San Francisco. Sanford, a senior vice president of IBM’s internal On Demand Transformation and Information Technology initiatives, talked about some of the principles of innovation that IBM has been using to guide its business recently. In mentioning where new leadership may come from, Sanford talked about “the need to tap into the creative minds of gamers and apply that in the work world. I can imagine phenomenal effects if we’re able to do that,” she said. Sanford gave the examples of Second Life and EverQuest II as places from which tomorrow’s leaders could emerge. “Gamers are bringing a whole new set of skills to the table,” she said. “Games — the really good ones — have an inherent level of education they’re providing. You learn as you play; you’re either going to master it, or be dead trying.” (more…)

Yeah, baby! That’s our reaction to the news that Peter Ludlow — aka Urizenus Sklar in the virtual world of Second Life — has been named one of the ten most influential gamers by no less august a body than MTV.

The Unwelcome Guest: Peter Ludlow. It’s not every day that getting kicked out of an online video game puts you on the front page of The New York Times. But University of Michigan professor Peter Ludlow’s disputably “bad” behavior in “The Sims Online” did just that in January of 2004, after the game’s publisher, Electronic Arts, revoked Ludlow’s online citizenship. The offense was Ludlow’s publication of a “TSO”-centric newspaper that chronicled creative and sometimes troublesome behavior of other gamers in the world, including allegations that under-age players were involved in virtual-sex-related activities. EA claimed Ludlow’s newspaper violated the terms of service for playing “TSO.” Ludlow quickly took his act to the online world “Second Life,” where he began to rake muck for a new newspaper, “The Second Life Herald.” If you, too, dream of playing a game so sensationally that the game’s creators take notice, then Ludlow is the role model.

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Here’s a 3pointD tidbit that was kicking around among one or two people at Supernova today: SoonR, an application that lets you use your mobile phone to make Skype calls and access files on your PC, will reportedly announce a version for the Macintosh this week. While SoonR, which is one of the companies being featured at Supernova on Thursday, isn’t the micro-miniaturized ubiquitous computing app that folks were envisioning at the Metaverse Roadmap summit, it does extend a certain amount of mobile computing functionality to ordinary cell phones, and SoonR users have been clamoring for a Mac version for some time. Seems that time is now, according to those who apparently know.