October 10, 2007
Virtual worlds collide, talk about social networks
No one sent their avatars to the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose today – the event was an opportunity for real facetime between content creators, media companies, venture capitalists and analysts.
IBM and Linden Lab, the developer of Second Life, announced they would collaborate on developing universal avatars and interoperability between the growing number of virtual worlds.
Electric Sheep, the virtual world services company, unveiled its OnRez viewer – a browser-like program that simplifies the Second Life experience. It will be used by viewers of CBS’s CSI:NY TV series to pursue a mystery killer into the virtual world, in the latest crossover experiment by media companies with the metaverse.
The viewer is a tacit admission that Second Life is still too difficult to master for most people.
Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming at the research firm Parks Associates, told me the audience is still relatively small for virtual worlds, compared to membership of social networks.
Less than 2 per cent of US internet users are daily visitors to such worlds while 45 to 50 per cent are active users of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.
Yet virtual worlds seem natural extensions of social networks and inhabitiants of Kaneva and Gaia Online use social networking tools extensively in their worlds.
“Social networking sites are all about asynchronous communication with friends, while virtual worlds are all about real-time interaction,” says Giff Constable, head of software at Electric Sheep.
“Neither has been very good at the other’s mode of interaction so far, but there is no question that they will need to come together.”
