May your avatar follow you

Waiting for the emergence of universal avatars able to travel between virtual worlds, you can already have an avatar image that follows you around the web – a Gravatar, Globally Recognized Avatar. You just sign-up, upload an image, and assign it to your email address. From then on, your Gravatar, an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog will appear beside your name on any Gravatar-equipped blog you comment on.

Gravatar is now part of Automattic which means that the service is going to be even better. Features that previously required payment are now freely available to everyone. They will also be getting an upgrade soon.

British government wants to police virtual worlds

The British government is planning to take a firmer hand in policing activities within virtual worlds, in an acknowledgement of their increasing popularity. Lord Triesman, a minister at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, recently said that virtual worlds present "sharp challenges" such as child pornography, identity fraud, money laundering and copyright infringement in virtual worlds which need to be controlled. Lord Triesman refused to reveal whether specific legislation was planned.

Some restrictions have already been imposed on virtual worlds. Second Life, for instance, was recently forced to close all its casinos in order to fall in line with US laws banning online gaming.

Zabaware wins the “most human” computer of the year prize

Zabaware’s Ultra Hal Assistant software won the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence. The company’s awarded chatterbot software will give your computer a personality using AI, speech recognition technology, and real-time animation. Ultra Hal can be used as an entertainment program, a companion, or an office assistant. It learns from conversations, evolving and improving the more it talks with a person. In addition to chat it can perform such useful functions as remembering and reminding of appointments, keeping an address or a phone book, dialing phone numbers, launching programs and recent documents on command, and more. Ultra Hal will even offer you help with most of your Windows programs. And, last but not least, the Zabaware software utilizes an advanced realtime 3D character engine that delivers 3-D artificial human characters so convincing and engaging you could swear they were real.

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition where software programs attempt to convince human judges that they are actually people. In a Turing Test a judge talks with 2 “entities” - a human and a computer - simultaneously through a text-based instant messaging system. It is up to the judge to decide which is which.