A Whole New Arena
evawhite on August 13th, 2008
A few articles back I spoke about Virtual Living, I decided to take a better look at this business and here’s what I learnt. There are many virtual world platforms today. The biggest commercial start to virtual gathering was the computer game World of Warcraft. For those who don’t know, World of Warcraft is the fourth iteration of the game Warcraft. It made its first appearance in ‘Warcraft: Orcs & Humans’ in 1994. From simple multiplayer online games it evolved to massively multiplayer online games (MMOG). With ten million gamers online it could be no lesser than that.
Another game which started off offline and simple was ‘The Sims’ in 2000 which was evolved from ‘Sim City’ in which one could build and run a city. In ‘The Sims’ you could build and run a family. Groundbreaking as it was, it took some time to catch on. Namely, more widespread use of computers and better broadband internet availability. ‘Alphaworld’ started in 1995 is said to be the grand-daddy of virtual wording. Still running strong, all names are site linked, hit them to see more.
The most recent and biggest news item was ‘Second Life’. As the name implies you can create an online avatar of yourself in anyway you wanted. Hell, you could switch genders online to offline! Again, a huge hit. Why? Because it allows you to do everything you can do in real life and lets you do things you want to but can’t do in real life. However far your imagination can go. Run a museum if you want or a secret alter ego, anything. Linden dollars in ‘Second Life’ convert in the ratio 250 Linden to 1 US dollar. Money making opportunities can be created.
Then with ‘Entropia’ making news shortly after, one found people buying ‘virtual property’ with real money. Big money at that. One instance was 100,000$ forked up for a piece of online property in ‘Entropia’.
People doing quite the same thing there as in real life. Creating opportunities and making money. There are people developing property and availing to user paid-services. Think for a moment; A few million people logged on. Charging them even a dollar each is raking it in huge. Word is the biggest name in virtual worlds today is ‘Habbo Hotel’ but who’s to really say, there are so many other such platforms in the pipeline we need to wait to see which comes out on top.
We also have today the ‘3D camera’. What it does is digitally map people’s gestures and posture into a 3D world. The technology can also track facial gestures and match them onscreen in real time. It can also read the user’s body gestures to let them navigate and edit within the environment. Quite cool eh? I’d certainly think so.
