3D Virtual World News and a Quick Peak at NuVera

Time to look around the smaller 3D Virtual Worlds and see whats happening.

First up is news from back in January I failed to hear about until recently.  Blue Mars has apparently stopped development of the PC client, which essentially means the beginning of the end of that world.  As I pointed out before when I reviewed Blue Mars to begin with, the real promise of the world is a gaming platform in a common world.  What I believe really dragged the world down was the push to turn Blue Mars into another Second Life.  There was a lot more promise in making games on the CryEngine2 platform and allowing common avatars to jump from game to game, but somehow that direction never really got developed.

Instead what we got is an iphone app, and in the transition it lost its virtual worldliness.  Its a free app for avatar building and sharing your avatar with your friends, and 3D chatting.  Instead of chasing Second Life, they are now chasing IMVU.

I got the app for my ipod touch and discovered that my PC login worked, and my avatar moved to the ipod just fine.  I just do not find the app to be that interesting.  I’m not holding out a lot of hope for the new direction.  It works as a novelty, but I do not see any long term success.

The PC version still works, and the various cities are still open, but who knows for how long?  I would not be surprised if the plug is pulled on the PC virtual world by years end.  With CryEngine3 SDK being released for free, Blue Mars’s advantage as a game platform disappears.

Ah well, not all metaverse experiments are destined to succeed.

Onverse Marketing

And speaking of metaverse experiments, a booth at the local mall caught my eye.  I took a picture of it with my ipod.

Yes it is a booth promoting Onverse.com, one of the many 3D Virtual Worlds I have played around in.

To see a booth dedicated to promoting a virtual world at a gaming convention is not  uncommon, but to see one at a shopping mall, is very uncommon.  Onverse is based out of Tempe, Arizona where this booth happens to be.  Probably the only one around anywhere.  The few times I went by there was no one manning the booth, just a promotional video playing on a loop and four computers with the game running on them.  Interesting marketing strategy anyways.  I believe I mentioned in my Onverse review from a year ago, that the world is built by five guys working out of a garage.

A Quick Peak at Nuvera Online

NuVera Online can beat that, though.  The development team consists of a couple of people working in a bedroom.

I only recently found out that the program went open beta last fall.  (I used to be so up to date on these things, now months behind).  NuVera Online is marketing themselves as an adult oriented virtual world, but not in a porn way like Utherverse, more like in a no kids allowed so the adults can hang out kind of way.

Whenever I review a new 3D virtual world that still labeling itself as beta, I do not like to focus on glaring bugs that will likely get fixed eventually.  But the bug I encountered as I launched the world for the first time is too funny not to mention.

Just to show you there is still some work to be done on Nuvera, I signed up for an account (I’m Ariane there too), downloaded the client and logged in for the first time. As I was loading, I get a message “Asset not available” and it did not explain what asset.  Then when everything loads, I see this:

As you can see I loaded up not wearing pants (and yes the avatars are anatomically correct, at least the female ones), and when I attempted to put some pants on, I get “No owned products of this type”.  Yes that is one way to get me out of my pants… don’t give me any.

Luckily, I was in my free apartment where nudity is allowed.  I tried to get to “Tutorial Island” but it would not let me go to a public location without pants on.  A couple minutes passed before the freebie starter pants finally showed up.  Once I put them on, I was allowed to travel and try out the tutorial, where I learned how to change my avatars clothes. (Thanks guys, I think I figured that out on my own.)

NuVera Online is designed to be a player built world.  For $15 you can become a developer and submit textures or 3D models into the world, then sell them for profit.  With only two people building the program, they are likely going to rely heavily on player created content.  This was the founding philosophy of Second Life and it worked out for them eventually.  NuVera hopes to make money in the virtual real estate business.

I bet they at least do better than Blue Mars has.

New Years Eve in the Metaverse: Live Blog

Its New Years Eve, and temps are in the 30s tonight, and the local gigantic New Years concert has Ben Folds playing (yuck!).  So I’m staying in, and party hopping in the metaverse wherever I can find a good party.  I’m cruising multiple virtual worlds, and this may require some update breaks throughout the night.  Also I’m going in blind, not knowing in advance where the good parties are, but here goes.

First up, IMVU.  Haven’t been in here since the last time I blogged about it. First thing I notice is that I am an IMVU Millionaire somehow. Last time I was in game I only had half a million.  It pays to not play apparently.  OK, go to the chat room search, type “New Years” and see what comes up.  Ahh, a New Years Ball…

Decent crowd like the atmo.  Wow its a formal, I seem a little under dressed.  Lets try another scene…

Trying an Adult Pass event. Looks like a boat with fireworks.  Some girl from Britain is here, its 3AM in the UK right now.  What a way to party. Just turned New Years day in Bermuda, off to another virtual world.

And here we are in Inworldz.  The problem with Open Sims is that I have no wardrobe here.  They are playing 80s music, time to duck out.

Decent Crowd at the OSGrid greeting center, so how does one go about finding New Years Eve parties in OSGrid anyways?  Another problem with Open Sims, no event search capabilities.  So where to now?  I haven’t been to Blue Mars in a while.  Twinity either. I’ll probably need new clients for both, so I’m downloading both at the same time, lets see who wins… Twinity by a long shot.

Yay! New Years in Virtual New York City!  6 people, and this is the most crowded place in Twinity right now.  OK Atlantic Time Zone has just had their New Year.  Next up is Eastern Time Zone.  Lets see, has Blue Mars finished downloading yet?

Wow even fewer people for the big New Years bash than Twinity.  OK this place is dead tonight, I need some place that is alive and kicking for my Eastern Timezone celebration.

Hmm, time for an old standby…

There is always a big holiday gathering in Guild Wars!

OK ran out of different worlds, time to check out Second Life.  I found some scheduled New Years events on the SLU board, so I’m going to check them out blind without looking at a map to see if they might be lame.

First Stop New Toulouse.   Nice crowd. Very formal. Good opportunity to dress in my hot red dress.

I checked out a few others, but the New Toulouse party seemed to be the best, so I stayed there for the Central and Mountain Time zone parties.

But for the Pacific I had to check out a nude beach party at SDI

Happy New Years Everybody!!!

Signs of the Economy in Virtual Worlds

I predicted a year ago how economic troubling times would affect virtual worlds: Those profitable ones are likely to be even more profitable as people seek out cheap entertainment.  Those relying heavily on VC money will likely be hurting as VC money dries up.

The economy is apparently good enough in Entropia for someone to pay over $300,000 of real currency for a virtual night club in world.  Another night club made headlines a few years ago for selling for over $100,000.

Its not so good for Metaplace, the 2D virtual world preferred by the SL crowd for its flexibility in building.  Metaplace closed its doors to the public on Jan 1.

Also problematic is life over at Forterra, a platform provider that gets most of its money from military contracts.  They recently laid off more than half of the staff and are probably looking for someone to buy them out.  Their principle product, OLIVE, is a nice flexible 3D platform with text, voice, and video capabilities that runs on inexpensive computers.  Their lack of success lately is probably due to stiff competition in the platform market: Unity, Torque, Multiverse, and Open Sim are all available for cheap or even free.

Meanwhile, Blue Mars is slowly adding user created content and additional features.  Recently the makers of the steampunk region Caledonia in SL have built a city in Blue Mars.  I wonder if anyone has done a “Mirror World” of a virtual world before?  (I’m pretty sure it has been done, just sounds funny)

I foresee the next year doing the same thing.  Profitable Virtual Worlds will remain so, maybe even becoming more profitable.  Meanwhile I would not be surprised to see another 3 to 5 virtual worlds shut down operations.

Blue Mars is NOT Second Life

I want to take a second look at Blue Mars from the perspective of what Blue Mars is trying to be. It is still very unfinished of course, but based on what I read and what I have seen so far, I get a picture of Blue Mars’s real purpose, and it is not what most people think.

The majority of the people jumping on the Blue Mars bandwagon are Second Life players, hoping for something similar, or more accurately, something not in control of Linden Labs.  I feel for them, but they are likely to be disappointed.

Let me tell you what I believe Blue Mars really is and why its goals are not compatible with the Second Life model of the 3D web. Or, to use an obvious metaphor, Second Life is on Venus, Blue Mars is on Mars.

Take a look at what Blue Mars is doing.  First, as I pointed out in my previous review of Blue Mars, a primary activity in virtual worlds is building stuff, and Blue Mars is keeping the building parts out.  Second, they are keeping avatars fairly standard, with only the face being adjustable. Third, they are built on a gaming engine designed to be flexible enough to make many kinds of video games, not just social worlds. Fourth, the tools they are making available to “developers” are professional level, requiring some prior game design knowledge, sending the message “amateurs need not apply”.

The missing piece of the puzzle is to look at the latest trends in 3D Virtual World games, and I consider myself an expert. Take a look at my What is the Metaverse? page. I give a list of attributes for a metaverse, one of which has sadly not come into fruition. To quote:

Game Launching – Think XBox Live, where you meet up with your friends, pick a multiplayer game to play, you all load up the game and suddenly you are all teamed together. Obviously XBox Live has this ability, but XBox Live is all text until you get into the game. Playstation 3 Home is a 3D social world that lets you do this too. If we really want to have a “Metaverse” this is the way to do it: Tie all the individual online games together, let players carry their identity from game to game, and provide a way to move in groups between games.

My idea is to create a toolbox that game developers could use so that player could move from game to game with the same identity and similar avatars.  Playstation 3 Home is supposed to have this ability, I do not know how well it works. I know others were attempting this ability, but never successfully.

What we have been seeing as a trend is an intermediate step: Create a bunch of small games yourself and  integrate them into a larger virtual world. This is what Free Realms is doing, as well as Empire of Sports, Football Superstars, and Moondo.

The design of Blue Mars is that of a portal to various games. Each game space is capable of having its own rules and designs, but uses the same avatars in each room. What Blue Mars is mostly looking for is “game developers” to create these game spaces, not SL object builders or fashion designers.  Some game spaces could be created to work similar to  Second Life, or they could be adventure games, sports simulations, RPG games, even first person shooters, as long as it is 3D and runs on the CryEngine2 and designable using the game engine provided.

This is what Blue Mars really is: A gaming portal with common avatars.  It is not a good place to start a designer business like Second Life is, it is not a good place to become a merchant or build your dream house or hold meetings.  Blue Mars is designed to be a place to build 3D games and get other players to come check out your games.

If successful, Blue Mars will be a compliment to SL, not a substitute.  Second Life is designed to be a social network but has limited game design potential (made problematic by script lag).  Blue Mars is designed to be a gaming network with limited social potential.

I do not have any thoughts about Blue Mars potential for success in this venture, except to point out it is likely to be difficult. The real measure of success will be if they actually attract professional game designers and gaming companies to create content for their platform.

In the mean time, they are going to have to develop some “developers” themselves. These early developers are likely to not be very good early on, but will get better.  Meanwhile, Blue Mars needs to develop their own in house “killer apps” to attract players.

There is potential here but it is a path that has never been tried before.

A Quick Peek at Blue Mars

Blue Mars has officially gone into open beta so I can now talk about it in full. So where to start?

First I need to say that I am reviewing a beta product. There are many bugs, which I wont discuss, and there are many missing elements I will discuss that I assume will get fixed eventually. My initial impression was not very good but I met with one of the admins in world and he  says many of my concerns will be addressed in future releases as noted below.

What I can see now is the overall game plan of the admins.  Could Blue Mars be the Second Life killer everyone is looking for?  Short answer: no. Long answer I’ll address in a future post.

I decided to break down my review by looking at the various components I expect to see in a 3D Virtual World.

3D Graphics - So once you get past the avatar creation step (which I will talk about later) and pick a destination to visit, the first thing you notice is that Blue Mars looks fantastic. It is by far the most realistic 3D virtual world out there. I took a walk on the virtual beach and the waves and surf as it hits the sand is damn close to the real thing. You know how when you walk on a real beach the water gets repelled from your feet? They simulated that on the virtual beach. Lighting, weather, everything, just looks fantastic.

Avatars – Now here is where things start to get a little messy. The first thing you are greeted with is the avatar creator, and it is one of the least intuitive avatar systems I have ever seen. Trying to get your skin tone and eye color right is down right frustrating. Whats wrong with just letting us choose these options right up front? Then they have three different ways of adjusting your head and facial features, none of them are very good.  If you play other 3DVWs I highly recommend going to “advanced” and using the good old slider bars. Even here, the slider bars seem to have a mind of their own.

The avatars were done by e-Frontiers a Japanese company that owned Poser for a while.  Unfortunately, the adjustments you can make here are no where as flexible as Poser. They seem to have designed it to keep “fugly” avatars from being created, but at the same time make it difficult to make really attractive avatars as well.

Previously, I wrote an essay on what makes a good avatar: the looks of PS3 Home avatars, the interactivity of There avatars, and the flexibility of Second Life avatars. The avatars got the PS3 home looks down, but still lack the interactivity of There  and flexibility of SL.

Another virtual world fan has a way to measure avatars from game to game by simply asking 3 questions. Can you get naked? Can you make your avatar look like yourself? Can you be something other than human? The answer to all 3 is NO! You can only look like yourself if you happen to be a petite 15 year old. Body shapes types and even heights cannot be adjusted at all. Apparently the reason for this is to make sure all animations work the same for everybody.

User Created Content - You can sign up for the development program to design original content for Blue Mars. They will give you some off the shelf tools compatible with the CryEngine2 platform, but it is up to you to figure out how to use them.  All content has to be submitted for approval, and I have no idea how long that takes. Most of the tools that are available are very high end for 3D artists who know what they are doing. If you don’t know what a LOD is, you will probably get frustrated quickly.  Considering how building stuff is a major component of all successful virtual worlds, I’m not sure how well this will go over.

This is a weakness of any platform built from “off the shelf” software.  Second Life, There, and IMVU were designed from the get go with user created content in mind.  CryEngine2 was designed for professional game developers, and most of us amateur designers, are likely going to find the process a bit overwhelming.

Stuff to Do – Blue Mars is built on a gaming engine, and thus there are a few games available. The first one I tried was a fly a hover ship (a helicopter without blades – this is set in the future after all) through a series of rings. Controlling the ship was so unintuitive that I did not bother with the game and just decided to fly around the scenery. There is a golf game too, which looks good but not as fun as dedicated golf games. I assume that over time there will be a lot more stuff to do. The Admins to their credit are giving all the tools they can to developers, its only a matter of time before people start making some really cool stuff.

Interface Notes – Things that need some work to make the game more usable and playable for typical players:

Avatar Movement -  Your avatar can do two things, walk and run, and there do not seem to be any easily accessible vehicles to do anything else. Worse, moving around Blue Mars is frustratingly unintuitive.  Movement is all based on clicking the ground and having your avatar walk to that point. MMORPG fans are used to this. ASDW keys do not work because of the need to type text, which is fine, but the arrow keys behave very weirdly. Your avatar turns, but the camera does not. Pressing “up” is the equivalent of clicking on the ground a couple of feet ahead of the avatar, but without the camera following, it is very difficult to “steer” your avatar.

Each zone seems to play by its own rules too. You can fly in New Venice. Press escape and your camera will fly around using ASDW keys,  Press Q and your avatar will land where you flew to.  There is no flight in Beach City yet, it is all point and click to navigate there which is annoying because of the size of the city.

Camera Movement – Using scroll to zoom does not function normally (it did in hover ship mode, but not avatar mode).  The only way to zoom is in the “camera” menu and even then there are only 4 preset zoom settings. You can pivot the camera around by holding the right mouse button.  Basically the camera controls do not make up for the lack of an auto following camera when using arrow keys to control. The Admin that I talked to says cameras are being worked on.

Graphics Compatibility – The incredible graphics of Blue Mars comes at a price. You have to have a pretty robust computer to run it (nvidea 8800 or higher), limiting the number of players right from the start. According to the admin, the Beta test currently runs in the highest graphics settings for testing purposes. Later they will allow lower settings and lower graphic requirements.

Blue Mars currently runs in a window with a set resolution that looks a little small on my 2048X1170 monitor.  Currently, only  the Developers version has graphic adjustment settings, future player clients will eventually allow you to change the graphics settings.

The “Very Beta” State of the game – The following are things that are missing or sub-par at this time. Hopefully they will be coming soon:

Communication Systems - Currently local chat only. The chat tool consists of either bubble text or chat window by people in close proximity with you. They have a primitive “Friends” system to keep track of people you meet and find out if they are online or not. There does not seem to be any IM system or player search or teleport system at this time.  The Admin that I talked to in world says that there are plans to implement these things in future releases.

In Game Web Content – None at this time.  The admin I talked to says they plan to eventually enable in-game flash players for streaming audio, video, animation etc.

Out of game Web Content (i.e. Website, Social Networking, player profiles etc.)  - Currently a player forum and a developers blog are available. They have basic player profiles now too.

Bottom Line – The makers of Blue Mars seem to have taken an off the shelf graphics engine, an off the shelf gaming engine, and off the shelf avatars, put them all together in hopes of being the next Second Life.

What we get is incredible graphics, weak gaming elements, and nice but uninteresting avatars mashed together with little common purpose or interaction.  One of the most common VW activities, Building, is only available to developers, and done outside of the game. There are no web services yet, no streaming audio for clubbing, no built in browsing or linking. Even though this stuff may eventually get fixed and improved, it is destined to always have a patched together feel you don’t get with virtual worlds built from scratch.

This is more obvious from a developers tool standpoint as different components have to be developed using different tools. It is going to seriously limit what is possible in game, and eliminate any possible contention as a “3D web standard”.  The graphics are great, I admit, but as I previously mentioned in a past post, great graphics do not make a great game.

At this point, Second Life and There have nothing to worry about.

Random Notes from the Metaverse

Notes from the Metaverse:

- I’ve been in a Guild Wars state of mind lately, which makes it hard to blog. Whenever you see months of no blogging, it is usually when I am playing Guild Wars.

- The Sims 3 is out now.  Have not gotten it yet, but the reviews look good. In the past I have gotten obsessive with The Sims:  1, 2, and Sims Online. Got burned out really bad at one point, not sure I’m over that.  Spore and Sim City Societies were kind of disappointments.  Apparently they are going with an online update system this time, where you can purchase new objects individually, instead of prepackaged CDs. If virtual worlds are any indicator, this could ultimately be an even more profitable way to go, especially if they open up to 3rd party brokering.

- Still waiting on Blue Mars to go open beta. I’m hearing really good things from beta testers, but they are not allowed to get specific or show screen shots per the NDA.  The Open Beta should happen later this year. I keep hearing “two months”, but I have heard that for the last 7 months.

- Also waiting for the new Second Life continent “Ursula” to open up.  The adult only continent where the rules are quite a bit more relaxed. I’m very curious how this experiment will work out, it could potentially be a disaster that ends SL once and for all, though the odds are small on that front.

- Speaking of which, SL is showing revenue growth in an other wise declining economy, just as I predicted in a post last January. Because of its low start up cost (free) more people are joining Second Life, and actually staying more, but as expected, they are spending less money per account. According to a recent interview with Phillip Rosedale, it seems the player growth rate is exceeding the spending decline rate, resulting in a net gain. Interesting.

- And finally, I released a new Dating Simulator update again, version 5.8. In the last version, I improved the swimming scenes, but noticed a “bug” that if you go to the kitchen after swimming, it goes immediately to an ending scenario. There was a very simple fix for this, but I decided the bug is a symptom of a problem in general: all the late date ending scenarios either involve sex or drinking, and if you do something dumb early in the date, all you are left with is drinking.

In an effort to open up the ending a bit, if you do go to the kitchen after eating dessert (or swimming, or showering), Ariane will suggest what to do next based on what you have or haven’t done so far. You can accept or decline her recommendations, until she gets tired of your constant rejections, or she runs out of ideas, whichever comes first.

The basic pattern of the whole dating simulator is to start out with a few basic options, explode into a ton of options, and then if you don’t royally screw up, finish with one of a few appropriate endings. Unfortunately, there are not enough appropriate endings. I needed a fun innocent ending to round it all out to add as a “bonus” to the suggestions.

The “downtown” solution to this is to find an amusement park to check out for a silly but innocent ending. I decided I needed a home version of the amusement park and came up with a “board game” ending.

Now I had the idea to have a board game in the dating simulator since version 1.0, but kept on running into obstacles. It would be silly to simulate a whole game unless I picked something easy like Tic-Tac-Toe or Nim, which are too predictable. So I decided to just simulate the ending of a game.The decision of which game ending to simulate came down to  two criteria: 1. It had to be a game with simple ending scenarios (Life, Clue, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, etc.) 2. It had to be a public domain game (Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Chinese Checkers, most standard deck card games). For whatever reason, these two criteria are nearly exclusive. It took a while to finally figure out that Parcheesi is probably the only game in both categories, hence that is what I picked.

The Future of 3D Worlds: Game Integration

So I decided to follow up the kind of negative post about Lively with something more positive. There have been a few small positive news stories on the 3D Virtual World front: XBox Live has added their own Avatars similar to Wii Miis, Football Superstars is now in Open Beta so anyone can sign up, Playstation 3 Home will be opening as well in December, Project Blue Mars has announced plans to go beta in January 2009. A new casual gaming site called Moondo opened up this month. The only negative news is that Awomo is putting their 3D social game on the back burner to focus on their streaming gaming platform.

What all of these stories have in common is that they point to the future of 3D social virtual worlds, namely 3D game integration. I have been advocating this for 5 years now.

The basic pattern is this: Group meets in 3D social world and decides to play a multiplayer online game. Group migrates to that game and plays. When they are done, group moves back to social game to chat about experience.

The result is that it enhances the gaming experience in both ways: The problem in social virtual worlds is there is not always stuff to do or talk about. The problem in multiplayer gaming is you do not get an opportunity to chat with your co-players. With integrated 3D gaming, you get the benefits of both.

As I see it, this is the future of the 3D web. If you can also move your ID or better yet avatar from game to game even better.

Despite all the news stories above, we are not there yet, but that is the direction we are headed. Lets start with the Xbox360 live story. One of the fun little “toys” that came with the Wii was the ability to make mini avatars. They are very simplistic, but there are enough ways to change them that everyone can make unique ones. Then once you create a Mii, you can use the character in some Wii games, particularly Wii Sports. These have proven so popular that Microsoft decided it would do something similar for the XBox360, and their avatars are now available to live subscribers starting this month.

Two years ago, when the latest console wars began, Sony announced Home for the Playstation 3. The closed beta has gone on for a year and a half now, with apparently a lot of internal drama. The primary role of PS3 Home is to do exactly what I described above, the multiplayer games being limited to Playstation 3 titles.

Two new online multiplayer games also demonstrate this concept, though incompletely. First is Football Superstars. This game is a combination multiplayer football (Soccer) game and 3D social virtual world where you can live the “lifestyle” of a pro athlete, cashing in fame for goodies.  This an excellent proof of concept that could be expanded to other online games, or multiple online games could share a social virtual world.

A second demonstration is at moondo.com. There is no “social” virtual world on this site, but it does have the ability to design avatars that can play multiple 2D and 3D online games with the same character/avatar and again gain rewards for avatar add ons.

Finally, there is the upcoming Project Blue Mars, which I wrote about earlier, starting a beta test in January and aiming for April for full release. Built on a gaming engine platform rather than a VW platform, integrating video games into this social virtual world should be easy.

What I do not see happening yet in any of the above programs is a true combination of 3D virtual world and 3D gaming. The makers of PS3 Home insist on no user created content, and no accommodation for “role play”, making it purely just a meeting and shopping world.

The ideal will be a 3D world that does everything, and if the transfer protocols are done right, there can be more than one 3D social virtual world, just a simple protocol to move from one game to another, alone or in a group, via some teleport hyperlink.

That would be the true beginning of a 3D internet!

Project Blue Mars: The SL Killer?

 

So a few weeks ago I discussed the ups and downs of realism in gaming, more or less stating that realism is good up to a point, though not necessarily needed for success. I also recently demonstrated that Second Life is not all that realistic anyways.

Also in recent weeks, Google Lively was released and turned out not to be the Second Life killer we all thought it might be.

Then there is the matter that Second Life is 5 years old, meaning its 5 year old technology. Its only a matter of time before something better comes around, something to steal away those that crave realism, something that really could be a Second Life killer.

I recently came across info on a new 3D Virtual World in development called Project Blue Mars. You can read about it at http://www.avatar-reality.com/. Now its still in development with no release date, but the idea behind it, and the awesome screenshots and more awesome screenshots tells me this may be the game changer we have been hoping for/dreading for a while.

The game plan is to build a world based on the idea of a terraformed Mars in the year 2177. OK a sci-fi conceptual world sounds neat. But its the tech underneath thats important.

First they are licensing the CryEngine2 gaming engine, used in the most advanced game out right now Crysis. Next you make a deal with e-frontier (now a division of Smith Micro) makers of Poser and Shade, and creators of a huge library of 3D objects that can be imported into the game, including realistic people avatars and residential houses, furniture, etc. Finally, you license 3D Game Studio, a gaming development platform that can create dozens of activities for players to participate in (notice the golf course in the screenshot above). This is the basic building blocks to a successful 3D Virtual World that potentially could blow all the competition away.

I’m not making any bold predictions, especially since there is no finished product yet, or any info on user created content potential, or any of the other dozen questions that come to mind. Let me just wish them well, and keep a close eye on this project.