Now You Can Become a Part of Virtual Worlds and Get Second Life
What are the problems regarding virtual worlds on the web? People are getting crazy about virtual worlds. Everybody have every prospect of success being a part of one of the massive social communities (MySpace, Second Life, Facebook, etc.). In virtual worlds nobody knows whether you nerd or smart, ’cause you seem to be clever and pretty cool. It’s really easy to sweet-talk and give baloney to everybody one mixes with.
What are virtual worlds? “A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars. This habitation usually is represented in the form of two or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids (or other graphical or text-based avatars). Some, but not all, virtual worlds allow for multiple users.” (wikipedia)
On the one part, we see the growth of the Internet, and can’t turn a deaf ear to this process of convergence. Folks got into the habit of hacking and talking, watching and uploading their fave videos, partaking in discussions on blogs, forums, etc. On the other hand, we don’t have to forget in what way the internet may have a bad and good influence on humankind.
Virtual Worlds are around the web. You’re already probably a member of Second Life, Active Worlds, Kaneva, vSide, Entropia, Novoking, Ogoglio, etc., and the list can be extended. Such Worlds, let you visit and chat in incredible 3D worlds that are built by other users. Visitors to these online worlds can build themselves digital bodies, move into digital rooms, make friends and hang out with them in three-dimensional play spaces, shop online, explore unique virtual worlds.
According to the 2007 Influence Forum, ICANN CEO Paul Twomey told that virtual worlds are the future of global commerce, advertising, thereby suggesting the world of tomorrow is virtual one. I reckon it’s in our hands to change the world to better and decide the outcome of the world.
According to Stuart Dredge, there are 20 trends defining virtual worlds in 2007 which he compiled after the conference. The blogger supposes his ideas to be subjective but interesting:
- There’s a problem with communication. As a semi-outsider, one thing I noticed is that a lot of virtual worlds people are good at talking to other people within the industry, but struggle more to explain their worlds in language that normal consumers would understand. There’s still a bit too much jargon, and high-falutin’ language that makes virtual worlds sound eminently geeky.
- Is it an online game or a virtual world, or both? One of the most interesting trends highlighted at the conference was the blurring of the boundaries between virtual worlds and online games.
- Advertising is another wild card. Everyone knows that brands are doing Stuff And Things in Second Life and rival worlds, but that’s more branding / marketing than pure advertising.
- Media streaming is more common, but strangely low-profile. Maybe this was the result of this bunch of speakers at this particular conference, but there wasn’t much talk last week about the challenges and opportunities of streaming music and video into virtual worlds.
By the way, players hope to connect their separate domains to form a 3-D Internet,
writes Erica Naone talking about Virtual Worlds. Currently users (namely geeks) hang out in 3-D virtual worlds feeling lack of chance to move freely from one world to another. Virtual Worlds should join hands and combine resources to give users what they really need.
“To make the virtual-world experience as rich as possible, developers need to find ways to consistently render objects…” adopting 3-D web standards “someone who has built a car in MTV’s Virtual Pimp My Ride might want to take it into Linden Lab’s Second Life to show it off. In order for the car to remain the same in both worlds, its underlying programming must make sense to both systems.” (via)
All the same we can’t exclude the fact that 3-D Internet may be very dangerous. Virtual crackbrains will never be the same again if they fall into virtual world and couldn’t find a way-out of there. In philosophy we can come across a term “duality”, the state or quality of being two or in two parts. For example, a gamer can’t switch over to a call or fire alarm, therefore he can’t distinguish reality and virtual world.
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Technorati Tags: virtual worlds, second life, videos, movies, media, streaming tv, web television, shows, games, Active Worlds, Kaneva, vSide, Entropia, Novoking, Ogoglio, research, digital media, 3-d reality, myspace, facebook
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