Alto's Blog

In North America the Second Life virtual world gets enough media attention to give the impression it is the only virtual world. Reality is a bit different: there are dozens of virtual worlds and Second Life is not the biggest.

I distinguish the various virtual worlds into three categories:

“User Built” virtual worlds like Second Life, OpenSim/OpenLife, HiPiHi, Activeworlds, and to a lesser extent There.com (and Forterra’s spin-off, Olive) facilitate user creation of the inworld environment. This approach is attractive to the education community in particular because it offers an “immersive” environment in which students easily get involved, and it allows the creation of simulations and other teaching aids.

“Collaborative” virtual worlds such as Qwaq, Croquet, and ones such as those in development at Sun (MPK20, built on Project Wonderland underpinnings) and IBM are primarily designed for meetings and collaborative teamwork, offer a lot of tools for those purposes, and are especially attractive to corporations looking to sharply cut travel costs and/or be able to form teams of people who are geographically dispersed. In January, 2008, at the Boston Media-Grid Summit it was announced that the Immersive Education Initiative had selected Croquet as one of three official “next generation” immersive education platforms (the other two were Second Life and Sun’s open source Project Wonderland).

“Social” virtual worlds, which mostly lack the user creation and team tools, would include the massively popular CyWorld, Habbo, Neopets, IMVU, Club Penguin, Stardoll, Barbie Girls and FusionFall sites... these sites are primarily attractive to a younger audience (Habbo’s average user is around 11 years old; Neopets’ user is about 9). I would also count in the Social category a number of new sites (aimed at adults) now in various stages of development: Riplounge, Twinity, eRepublic, Whirled ... the list is long and more are being added almost daily. Some will survive and thrive; others I doubt will make it out of Beta. I know of 16 more social sites aimed at audiences under 20 that are somewhere in the early stages of development or launch.

As usual when one tries to fit things into categories, there are a few square pegs that will not fit. Novoking is an interesting hybrid of Social and User Built. At the moment it seems more social, but that is likely because you can only use external tools (Blender, Maya, etc) to create objects to render inworld. If inworld building tools do eventually materialize, Novoking could be very interesting.

More on the future of virtual worlds in a future post.