The more avatars than Americans stat is one of many things I learned about the 3D Net edge by spending two days last week at Virtual Worlds 2008 in New York. Avatar mobbing is virtually here for sure. A keynote by Barbiegirls.com described the girls’ virtual world sensation, where 11 million are signed up and thousands more join every day. Another huge virtual world toy phenomenon is neopets, where the toy in a child’s hand has a virtual life online. The virtual world of gaming also contributes huge portions of the avatar population.
A topic that popped up now and then was whether avatars from one virtual world could one day function in another virtual world. The idea led to speculations on interoperability among virtual worlds. I had been worrying as I learned more and more about the trend in the virtual world sector whether they were headed into the walled garden trap which mutes the network effect of the open Web. To a panel that was speculating on the functionality of corporate intranets, I raised my concern. The fellow that responded looked down his virtual nose at my perceived naïveté and proceeded to explain that the “back in Web 1.0″ that kind of openness that Tim Berners-Lee gave us was good stuff, but things are different now that we are in Web 2.0. I objected but the panel changed the subject.
A little later in the same panel Q&A, Chris Renaud came into the room and the panel asked for his thoughts, introducing him as being from Cisco. Chris said, the discussion of how to have avatars interoperable among virtual worlds is like naming the children on the first date: premature. He said the problem now is how they can interact with the 2 billion people out there on the rest of the Net.
Yes! Mobs of avatars in the open Net are a much more interesting future than having one representation of myself inside of the virtual world where I work and another one where I play - or even the same avatar of me with credentials inside of several separate worlds.
The more avatars than Americans stat is one of many things I learned about the 3D Net edge by spending two days last week at Virtual Worlds 2008 in New York. Avatar mobbing is virtually here for sure. A keynote by Barbiegirls.com described the girls’ virtual world sensation, where 11 million are signed up and [...]
