April 06, 2007	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 17, 1428

LONDON: The arrival of the three dimensional web — in which participants have their own on-screen avatars — is dismissed by some as a nine days’ wonder that will fade away once the novelty has worn off. But that hasn’t stopped a fresh surge of development that is taking virtual worlds to wider audiences. One of the most interesting new arrivals is Kaneva, a kind of 3D MySpace. Instead of reproducing an entire world complete with houses, shops and casinos etc (as Second Life does), Kaneva simply offers members a flashy apartment of their own where they can bring friends, watch videos, play music, chat endlessly or teleport themselves instantly to someone else’s apartment. You need to run Windows with a good graphics card to participate in the beta trial.

Asia already has a hugely successful virtual world in Cyworld of Korea, which is now expanding globally, but it has just been joined by a rival from China called HiPiHi with the ambitious aim to “create a perfect society — a shared and fair world which will finally embrace the various cultures of the real world”. Other contenders include Whyville (an educational space for youngsters), There.com, the highly successful Habbo from Finland and the Swedish Entropia Universe. The new Sony PS3 also has a virtual world dimension. The unspoken drawback of these emerging worlds is that they will be incompatible — you can’t move from one to the other.

Meanwhile Second Life (SL), the most advanced, has not been sitting still. Back in July it had 330,000 members; nine months later it has well over five million and rising strongly. Critics have rightly pointed out that the five million figure includes inactive users. A more realistic figure would be the million or so unique visitors in the latest month.

In recent weeks Linden Lab, owner of SL, has introduced 3D sound, which fades as the person you are talking to moves into the distance. It has plans to enable users to set up their own websites within SL. In theory this could let people access their MySpace or Bebo social spaces from within SL, thereby removing the temptation to shift to upstarts such as Kaneva. Bebo doesn’t think that virtual worlds are suited to this kind of social networking. Bebo thinks that this is the year when networks will establish a presence on mobile phones, as it did last week with Orange. SL has proved particularly popular with women. Robin Harper, SL’s vice president for community development, says that while women are a little over 40 per cent of registrations they account for around 50 per cent of activity, partly because it is attractive, she says, to women who stay at home during the day.

Corporations are still piling into virtual worlds even though the attention generated by early adoption has ceased to give them cheap publicity. They are attracted because they are live economies with real transactions going on.

They can be used to sell virtual goods, such as Adidas trainers, or virtual versions of actual cars, or simply to create brand awareness in the real world. Some, such as IBM, are using them as serious business tools by holding international management conferences, thereby eliminating the need to worsen global warming by flying executives all over the world to a place they can meet.

Optimists within SL even nurture hopes that the Linden dollar (the in-house currency that is convertible into real dollars) could eventually become a micro payments system for the internet as a whole. There are regular rumours that some of the giant corporations may launch virtual worlds themselves, either as 3D intranets, or to produce a more stable experience than SL has so far managed to achieve.

Virtual worlds reached some kind of milestone last week when they held their first annual conference — although, curiously, it was located in New York, not in a 3D simulation. They need time before they gain the courage of their own convictions. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service