In this article, the author talks about telepresence, a combination of real-time video, audio, and interactive technologies that gives people in distributed locations a collaborative experience that's as close to being in the same room as current technology allows. In a culture that's still adjusting to iPhone-size screen displays and choppy cell…

Just a few years ago, virtual worlds were credited with the power to transform the universe. Used since the late 1990s in military and medical applications, virtual worlds first gained mainstream media attention when Linden Lab released Second Life in 2003. While other worlds, including open source environments, have launched since then (examples…