Blog post & video: 2008 Metaverse Tour Video: The Social Virtual World’s A Stage

Gary Hayes is "doing a commercial report and curriculum development on the evolving range of social virtual worlds and have recently ventured into fifty of them to review and sample the culture, creative, business and educational potential." While working on it, he video recorded his travels and created a seven minute video that gives a quick peek into many virtual worlds. His blog post highlights a few of his thoughts from this project. The one that really stood out to me as being critically important is:

A few new entrants realise that using a fully fledged, 3D game engine as the client for what is in the end a glamorous 3D facebook and requiring a high spec’d PC is not the best way. Second generation services like vSide have followed a good middle ground

Indeed, Second Life is now requiring a more robust PC setup to run its software. The trend should be to lighten the computing requirements so that more people can use these virtual worlds.




The audio on the video is just music, in case you don't want to disturb your neighbors at work. I do like the quotes Hayes has used in the video. They really make you think!

---

Thanks to Kathryn Greenhill for blogging about this.

---

Technorati tag: Virtual Worlds