Doppelganger to Expand with Real-Life Location Recreations

Doppelganger is expanding the size of its teen-oriented Music Lounge with a series of virtual worlds based on real cities. The company already has experience recreating real locations from the Virtual Lower East Side project, which is now in alpha. That world was created separately for MTV, though. These new worlds, based on Harajuku and Shinjuku in Tokyo, the 7th Arrondissement in Paris, New York, and Milan, and a planned community in Seaside, Florida, will be a part of The Music Lounge project. Doppelganger is aiming for an August release. [via Information Week]

Doppelganger has experience merging real-world brands into its world and tends to focus on urban products. We reported last month that it had partnered with Kitson and Rocawear to create a presence for the clothing companies in world. It sounds like this world will be no different.

"We wanted to base it on a real world city because that's the environment the average user is familiar with," said founder Andrew Littlefield. "And it gave us an opportunity to insert advertisements."

In a real-world environment, like Times Square, it just makes sense to include the type of billboard advertising that's been largely unsuccessful in Second Life.

"In a focus group, 90% of teens preferred commercial-rich environments because they felt it was more real," Littlefield said. "Teenagers today have really been the target of the most sophisticated media campaigns since they were born," he said. "They're very, very used to ads so one of the things we wanted to do was introduce these things with a very light touch, so it didn't feel like ads being jammed down their throats."