First the good news: virtual worlds are experiencing their own dot com boom. Now the bad news: virtual worlds are experiencing their own dot com boom. Tomorrow and Thursday, the second Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo launches in San Jose; the first one went off last March in New York, when just nine worlds/MMOs were showcased. Six months later, thirty of them will be on hand, many you’ve probably never heard of, and if past history is any guide, just as many you’ll probably not hear much about, afterward.
Seven slated for the show are kid-oriented, including Zwinktopia, Gaia Online, and Habbo Hotel, all of which have been featured on GigaOM; with the continued growth of MMOs for minors, this isn’t surprising. But then, four of them are virtual worlds designed for enterprise solutions, including Forterra, Unisfair, Project Darkstar from Sun Microsystems, and something called VT&T, a stealth project from a team of developers formerly of AT&T.
Like the original dot com boom, the Expo is an awkward convergence of traditional media corporations like Disney (new owner of Club Penguin), MTV/Nickelodeon (announcing eight virtual worlds), and Turner (which recently bought partnered with Kaneva), scrappy start-ups like Metaplace and Ogoglio, and lumbering into the proceedings like they always have, Microsoft with Virtual Earth and an unknown MMO set to be announced there.
And if the last boom’s trajectory of hubris and greed is followed, most of these are destined for obscurity– or acquisition by their wiser superiors. While kid-oriented MMOs have the most active users and thus seem like the safest bet, for example, as FoundRead editor Carleen Hawn suggests, they’re also fragile ecosystems that can fall apart with too much outside interference and commercialism.
In any case, I’ll be there to appear on a panel, and looking for GigaOM stories to file from the scene. If you see me, be sure to say hi; and if you miss me at this virtual worlds conference, you can still look for me at the one in London, later this month.
Disclosure: My Second Life blog New World Notes is a “media partner” with the Expo.
6 comments so far
11:15 PM PT
Turner partnered with Kaneva for a period of a year– not an acquisition.
11:25 PM PT
Thanks, good catch.
8:13 AM PT
I’m sorry did you say mtv is coming out with 8 virtual worlds? Im scared to even think what they will entail…
2:49 PM PT
Hi!
Thanks for the mention. To clarify things however we have four independent projects here at Sun Labs that relate to your topic.
MPK20: This is our own virtual environment that we are building for use by our remote and on site employees to assist distributed collaboration on work. It is a secure environment that includes desktop application sharing within the virtual world and sophisticated VoIP that includes dial in and dial out to traditional telephones.
http://research.sun.com/projects/mc/mpk20.html
Project Wonderland: This is an open source tool kit for building online virtual environments, particularly enterprise environments. It has such enterprise requirements as security and application sharing and VoIP built in.
https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/
jVoiceBridge: The VoiP technology that Project Wonderland uses. JVoiceBridge is open source and has been integrated with Project Darkstar.
https://jvoicebridge.dev.java.net/
Project Darkstar: Project Darkstar is an infrastructure product for latency critical event driven applications. It allows the programmer to write simple POJO objects with mono-threaded code and then Darkstar makes them highly scalable, reliable, fault tolerant and transparently persistent. It can be thought of as an “application server” designed specifically for the needs of developers building massively multi player online games and game-like applications.
Most of our current users and community members of Project Darkstar in fact are game developers, not enterprise developers.
http://www.projectdarkstar.com
Jeff Kesselman
Chief Instigator, Project Darkstar
2:53 PM PT
One thing I left out above…
MPK20 is built using Project Wonderliand.
Project Wonderland is a Project Darkstar Application.
10:32 PM PT
[...] 14, 2007 at 10:30 PM PT | No comments I still haven’t gotten around to unpacking from last week’s Virtual Worlds Expo in San Jose, Calif., but I have had time to streamline the biggest takeaways from the conference into a personal top [...]
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