The job involves laying down the infrastructure for your city to flourish - power, water, roads and rail - and then watching as businesses and virtual people, called Sims, flock in.
Instead, YY generates its music revenue from virtual goods that people purchase to give to singers on the platform.
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Microsoft, for instance, in 2010 let FarmVille players explore various parts of its Bing search engine and gave people virtual currency for Liking Bing on Facebook.
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The company has 25 people and 13 in its virtual newsroom, in which most people work remotely.
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People hang out in a virtual room and can dance or chat with other people and meet new people.
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Use of a special range-imaging camera also allows the software to add people within virtual spaces.
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Your interactions with the realistic virtual projections of other people will also be completely convincing.
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Never mind the long trudge through featureless virtual landscapes to find people in the first place.
Maps or Microsoft 's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Virtual Earth.
Now that planet-wide network of interlinked computers became a court of the people - virtual Athenian democracy.
What it might take, he said, was software that would let people browse virtual worlds like they do webpages.
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Some of the work, Lanier said, has its roots in the earliest days of virtual worlds, when people wore sensor-covered body suits to experience imagined environments.
These forms of virtual reality can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.
Virtual reality spider phobia treatments already exist, but this application is particularly realistic, allowing people to poke the virtual spiders, pick them up and let them crawl up their arms.
Audio is converted to "spatial" sound so that voices of people to your virtual left sound as if they're on your left.
The complaint says Second Life tried to lure people into the virtual world by promising it would be a unique place where residents actually owned their property.
Firms like Samsung and LG are inventing new types of handheld devices with voice-recognition and big screens to help people defend their virtual castles no matter where they are.
The service overall brings to mind the start-up Turntable.fm, a site for people to deejay music for their friends in a virtual club, though Shaker has more ways to interact with people.
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In a virtual world, he hypothesized, people would be able to communicate in similar ways.
Unless people start living in virtual buildings, there will always be plenty of bricks and mortar to trade.
So, in the virtual world, why do most people meet up with their friends on massive social networks like Facebook?
Many people participate in online virtual communities as a way to relax and escape the drudgery of the real world.
Now we create interactions and co-locate people and retailers in virtual space counting megabytes of data instead of millions of square feet.
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It has created virtual coupons (beenz) that people can collect when they visit Web sites and then use to make purchases--a kind of e-bribe.
When critics charge that Facebook, the largest virtual community on earth connecting more people than ever before, is a closed system, the terms seem to lose meaning.
Williams Communications (nyse: WCG - news - people ) is a virtual clone of the old fiber-optic company created by its parent, Tulsa, Okla.
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Matthias Mikshe, founder and head of Stardoll, said many firms were developing virtual worlds for children because young people were far more familiar with them than their parents.
Schober remembers a ticker dubbed "Network News, " a kind of virtual community newsletter that would let people know when certain chat rooms had a special guest or were discussing certain topics.
The Avatar Kinect system will let people host and attend virtual meetings and gatherings with the avatars of their friends and have their on-screen doubles act out what they are doing in real life.
Founded in 1995 by former defense contractor virtual reality pioneers, Zipper employed 80 people.
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