Science and technology graduates at the University of Sussex have created a virtual campus which looks like the university’s real site.

The virtual campus can be visited by people who are signed up to the web-based virtual world, Second Life.

Each user creates a virtual version of themselves, or an avatar, which can then fly around the campus.

Researchers are looking at ways to use the campus as a platform for teaching, such as providing online resources. more>>>

A university is holding an open day in the virtual world of Second Life.

BA Media students at Liverpool Hope University have set up a virtual campus on the imaginary world website as part of a six-month project.

Virtual students will be on campus on Thursday to interact with prospective students from across the globe.

Second Life is a virtual world operated via a downloadable internet programme that enables its users, or “residents”, to interact with each other.

There are more than 20 million residents registered. more>>>

An award-winning 3D reconstruction algorithm designed by a team of computer science researchers from UC San Diego brings this dream within the grasp of reality.

This research gets at the heart of “autocalibration,” a well-studied, fundamental problem in computer vision. Autocalibration aims to recover the three dimensional structure of a scene using only its images, acquired from cameras whose internal settings and spatial orientations are unknown.

Autocalibraton is part of a larger 3D image reconstruction challenge that has caught the attention of Google, Microsoft and others.

This technology could be put to use in a wide variety of applications. For example, someone selling shoes online could take pictures of their shoes and create 3D reconstructions of their inventory. Such reconstructions would provide more information about what the shoes actually look like than images or video footage can.

The algorithm could also be used to automatically align security camera networks used in casinos and airports. Coupled with existing technology for immersive media, the algorithm could be used to create augmented-reality walkthroughs of cities, supermarkets or any other places of interest. more>>>

When NASA begins launching astronaut teams on 800-day missions to Mars, one of the greatest survival tests these explorers will face is the inevitable alienation they’ll experience with their remoteness from Earth and the harshness of the frozen Red Planet.

After rocketing halfway around the solar system for 180 nights, these astronauts will start the first of 500 days on the Martian surface observing a cocoa-colored dusk fade into a star-saturated nightfall. Earth, 400 million kilometers away, will appear as just a twinkling blue diamond in the skies. The astronauts will have never felt so alone.

But NASA thinks it has an answer to the psychological challenge of interplanetary isolation. While aerospace engineers are designing the Ares rockets to be deployed in the Mars missions, a more starry-eyed contingent at NASA is testing networking and virtual reality technologies that they think will connect the first wave of Mars pioneers with their families, friends and colleagues back on Earth, in a 3-D virtual world cut from the mold of Second Life or World of Warcraft. more>>>