The Energy Mind is another way of speaking about the unconscious. It operates through metaphor, and, some of us believe, can touch upon realities and possibilities invisible to us in our everyday life. My explorations are done using a variety of techniques from Silvia Hartmann, a brilliant woman from the UK. And the results of these explorations are recorded here as stories. These explorations are not exactly games, lucid dreams, out-of-the-body experiences, virtual reality, or fiction, but there are similarities to all of these.

Chameleon is a 4min 30sec music video (machinima), filmed entirely in the virtual world of Second Life. It is a ground breaking film that uses techniques never before used in Second Life. Shot entirely in HD and edited on FinalCut Pro, the film uses the real life music of Canadian rapper Vandal, who is now based in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia.

Star Trek's holodeck is a famous science fiction concept. Crewmembers could walk through the garden of their childhood home, re-enact famous historical events or watch full, 3-D performances of famous plays. It was a rich source of story lines for the Star Trek writers because the holodeck offered so many opportunities to work, rest and play.

Each resident's perception of Second Life is unique. In a sense, it is not one world, but one million. Our experience of Second Life as a frustrating bug-ridden mess or a creative utopia is completely the result of our own thoughts and has nothing to do with any inherent quality of the tapestry of technology and beings we label as Second Life.

Multiverse enables development teams to create high-quality, unique, and engaging virtual worlds and MMOGs faster and for less cost than ever before.

I started Second Life over a year ago when they were offering free basic accounts. It took me a while to get into the game, because I was distracted with There and City of Heroes. But, in a fit of boredom, I decided to try and get into the game again, and found it has a lot to offer.

Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away.

I don't mean emptiness in a bad way, but emptiness in its Buddhist definition as the true nature of reality. No matter how many facts we've gathered about someone, the image of them that we weave together is still just a projection with more holes than substance. Facts don't tell us who they are, but only improve the probability that we can predict their future actions.

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research.