We’ve been crazy busy here in the Genkiiverse, so sorry for the silence. Adam and I took a trip to Shanghai and Beijing, meeting up with our partners at Fix8 , the crew at HiPiHi , and one of our new partners, iLemon .

iLemon provides solutions for custom 2D and 2.5D virtual worlds. Based in Shanghai, they’ll help us extend our options for creating virtual world presences for clients. Check out their site.

We’ve also partnered with two exciting academic institutions working in virtual worlds.

The National Institute of Informatics (NII) is located in Tokyo, and is doing a wide range of research in virtual worlds. Led by Dr. Helmut Prendinger , their projects include the development of a Multimodal Presentation Markup Language 3D (MPML3D) , allowing improved scripting for interactions between virtual world bots and users. Genkii will help NII distribute their ideas to a wider group of users.

The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) is using virtual worlds for large-scale simulations and visualization of astronomical data. Astronomers and researchers from a number of universities and institutions including Dr. Piet Hut from Princeton and Dr. Jun Makino from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan . Genkii will help MICA with explorations and development in OpenSim, and assist in facilitating support for this research from interested companies.

So, yeah. Lots and varied news. But there’s more to come!

We had a good time chatting with old friends and meeting new ones today at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo at Tokyo Bigsight. It was fun to see Philip Rosedale mingling with Japanese Second Life users and fans.

After the Second Life user party, we trekked over to a great Showa era izakaya in Shinjuku for dinner and drinks with Ben Goertzel where we chatted about artificial intelligence and virtual worlds.

Later, we joined some people at BarTube, where Ben, Philip, Jun Doi, and dozens of virtual world geeks like us jammed, drank, and chatted about the future.

Next time you should join us!

Ken

Hey there. Welcome. So it took us a while to get some information up on the site. There will be much more to come, though none of us are really web development geeks. All other kinds of geeks, sure.

Take a look around, peruse our presentations, and send us some feedback, if you’d be so kind.

And check out the new Ugotrade article. Good stuff about Genkii , plus words from our friends at Metabirds and Melting Dots .

We’ll be at the Tokyo Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo 2008 this Wednesday and Thursday. Hope to meet some new people there

Ken