If games, wildlife documentaries and virtual strolls in the park aren’t enough to validate virtual reality for you, try this one: educational motivation. School children in Ireland have been using a open source version of Second Life to learn coding, 3D modeling and to create virtual spaces of recent field trips. Their most recent project: recreating the monastery of Clonmacnoise and exploring it with an Oculus Rift. Technically the Rift isn’t part of the classroom’s normal operations — the founder of the MissionV virtual reality platform the school is visiting brought it with him on a recent visit — but it did give the students a new perspective on the world they had built. “Whoa, ” one student exclaimed, looking at the classroom’s recreation of Clonmacnoise’s McCarthy Tower. “That is humongous.” “The children spent two weeks building the model and were intimately familiar with the layout of the site and buildings as the appeared on the PC monitor, ” MissionV founder and CEO James Corbett explained. “But the full realization of the scale and perspective of what they built only dawned on them when they were immersed in this reality.” Having a virtual presence in the model actually changed how the children learned about it — and the promise of being able to play in the world they built was bound to be a heck of a motivator, too. It’s still too early to say if VR will become a common tool in education, but it’s still a blast to watch these kids romp around in a world of their own making. Check it out in the video below. Filed under: Gaming Comments Source: MissionV , Technology.ie

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Irish school children are building worlds for the Oculus Rift

Pandora can’t catch a break, it seems. Just weeks after the streaming radio service escaped paying higher royalties to songwriters, record companies and musicians have sued it in a New York court for allegedly violating state copyright laws by refusing to pay for older song recordings. The labels argue that Pandora is subject to state rules on compensation whenever it streams tunes recorded before February 15th, 1972, when federal law took over; right now, it’s only paying for those newer works. The suing parties claim that Pandora is both depriving artists of income and wielding an “unfair advantage” over on-demand competitors like Rdio and Spotify, which have no choice but to negotiate royalties for classic tracks. Pandora says it’s looking at the claims, and it hasn’t provided a formal response so far. However, you shouldn’t assume that it will fight the lawsuit tooth and nail — the legal action may not do as much damage as you’d think. As Santa Clara University law professor Tyler Ochoa tells us, the labels are likely suing in New York because it’s one of the few states with existing case law that addresses royalty issues like this. While some other states have their own relevant copyright rules, the music companies wouldn’t have a good precedent to work with in these territories. They would be “starting from scratch” and face a greater chance of losing, Ochoa says. As such, you shouldn’t count on seeing a state-by-state litigation campaign. Even a New York victory isn’t guaranteed, since the local law doesn’t offer perfect clarity on how to handle radio-like internet services. The record companies may also collect relatively little cash if they do win. As this isn’t a federal suit, Pandora might only have to shell out for songs that New York-based customers play. Any retroactive payments would be limited to the past three years, and there would be questions as to why the music outlets didn’t push for compensation much sooner. Pandora could theoretically avoid any new royalties by blocking New York customers from streaming pre-1972 songs, although it may not want to risk a backlash from angry listeners. To Ochoa, these factors make it “pretty likely” that the lawsuit will end in a settlement. There’s enough uncertainty that neither side would get much value from duking it out in the courtroom. The odds are that Pandora won’t take a serious blow, and that the labels will only have limited success in getting money for their golden oldies. [Image credit: Dustin Gaffke, Flickr ] Filed under: Internet Comments Via: New York Times Source: RIAA

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Labels claim Pandora owes money for streaming old songs, probably won’t get it