Blogging Virtual Worlds Fall: Keynote-Chris Sherman, Sibley Verbeck, and Anthony E. Zuiker
After Christopher Sherman, Executive Director, introduced the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo, highlighting the significant growth from the spring conference in New York, Sibley Verbeck, CEO Electric Sheep Company, continued the theme by asking how many of the over 1000 attendees had been present at the smaller spring conference—only about one in three.
“For you in the media here that are looking to be a little snarky, we’ll make it easy for you,” he said. “ Here’s a headline ‘Virtual Worlds Industry Shows Low Retention Rate.”
Verbeck then approached the state of the metaverse from a demographic standpoint. Some points offer innovation, but, by and large, Verbeck pointed out potential for virtual worlds that no one is taking advantage of.
“The kids virtual worlds market, so pre-teen, is really the first virtual worlds market that’s become mass market and successful from a business point of view.,” he explained. Clearly those are here to stay. We’ve seen millions of users spending their money, or at least their parents’ money, on virtual worlds.”
Through that competition, he sees the significant innovation. It involves asking “how do you make the user experience work for users with short attention spans.” The kids space is where Verbeck says he’s watching to see what succeeds in fails.
In the teen space, worlds like Gaia Online and IMVU are adding value to social networking and IMing with virtual world components.
“We also see coming from the virtual world side, and there are lots of platforms as well, taking the very deep experience like MTV, There, and too many others to list. One of the things to watch is these people taking normal things and adding more and more virtual world elements to it. The other, if you weren’t at the first conference, MTV explained what’s, as far as I know, the most successful business model built on more and more advertising. But one thing I’m not seeing tthere yet that will get to a breakout stage is a virtual world doing both of these things. A world that provides all of the immersive experience and the 2D synchronous and asynchronous communication that teens already use.”
The adults space, Verbeck said, is farther behind.
“A lot of the business models haven’t even be experimented with yet,” he explained. “With the right technology, a lot of the consumer experience for ecommerce could be at least as good if not better than shopping on the Web. I think the time will come, and I don’t know when, when most consumer ecommerce is done in virtual worlds. But I don’t see anyone really doing that.”
“There’s more and more mainstream projects that can bring virtual worlds to mass market audiences,” said Verbeck. “That’s why we wanted to bring Anthony Zuiker out here.”
Zuiker is the creator of the CSI franchise, and is now working with the Electric Sheep Company to bring CSI: NY online to Second Life. After a trailer introducing CSI, Zuiker took the stage to explain the background of CSI.
“What’s the future of television?” he asked. “It is as follows: TV, online, mobile, and gaming.”
There has to be original, great content that can then be distributed online and through mobile updates and interacted with in gaming and virtual world environments.
In June of 2007, CBS told Zuiker that it had invested in Electric Sheep and offered him the chance to set out a virtual world narrative. Two weeks from today, Gary Sinise’s character and other CSI:NY characters will chase a killer in the real world and follow his avatar in Second Life. CBS will provide two 30-second spots advertising the virtual world created by Electric Sheep to call people to action online, all leading up to a months-long answer to the episode’s cliffhanger.
“Our simulation called CSI: NY the virtual world will be very simplified. It’s a nine-minute download time. There’s something for the beginner, the intermediate, and the advanced. When you fly around the sim you’ll see all virtual Manhattan. If you’re intermediate, I’ll be sponsoring a thing called Virtual Zuiker, a blog-based murder mystery. You’ll be challenged to write in 500 words or less what happened in a crime scene. I’ll read every excerpt. There’ll be one hidden clue, that if you find it, it’ll take you to a website with a SLURL back in world where you get a prize.”
In the episode, Venus, the virtual assassin, will escape into world where she’ll release killers into the world where users have to solve the problem. That will continue until February when the narrative picks up in the real world. A real musician, Zuiker hypothetically suggests Fergie, will help solve the problem in the TV show and then host a virtual concert in world, just days before the Grammy’s.
“That’s the future of television,” said Zuiker. “There’s been some negative press about Second Life. I think why is that a lot of companies are cutting big checks with no real application for promotability. We’re putting Cisco on the air twice to show their teleconferencing capability. And then we’re putting it into the world to solve the mystery. If you’re a beverage company, I’ll drop the drinks into the show and then into the world and people will need to drink them to solve the crime.”
He went on to list applications for credit cards, Tvs, and air conditioning units.
“We’re going to blow things up,” he concluded. “And the future is quite sweet.”
And then dressed as Santa Claus, Zuiker threw candy into the audience.
“I have a point to this,” he said while throwing chocolate into the audience. “50 years ago, Milton Hershey gave his chocolate to Frank Mars’ cookies and vice versa. They built the most successful candy bars in the world. You out there, marketers, developers, Fortune 1000, the future is good. Like that Snickers, the future is sweet.”
Interesting to see how this plays out, and a cool idea - but not being a media luvvy, I'm not completely enthralled (unlike many in the hall, from the tweets I've read).
Posted by: Aleister Kronos | October 10, 2007 at 12:15 PM
My take:
http://metaversed.com/11-oct-2007/big-media-couch-potatoes-and-virtual-worlds
This project doesn't care about the SL community at a certain level, because it's irrelevant, and not statistically significant for TV and ad sale demographics, and if it doesn't accept some American crime show, it doesn't matter to the sponsors. They can take it or leave it.
Rather, if the caper works as advertised, and the Lindens can funnel avatars as quickly as servers fill up on to empty servers, 150,000 people suddenly joining Second Life for six weeks might stick, and *they* might become the new community to which the old beta testers and craftsmen of SL will have to adapt, as one TV producer theorized it.
That's pretty sad, eh? Except...somehow, a means has to be found to pay for the continued development of the Metaverse. The crowdsourced internal economy won't cut it, and doesn't scale so effectively.
I found quite a few people were put off by having candy bars thrown at them to make this point about merging technologies. They landed on people's heads and hands and they started making annoyed remarks, to the point that Zuiker even asked laughingly, "Do we have insurance?"
And that indeed is the question to ask on this venture.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | October 13, 2007 at 05:18 AM
A cool idea, shame (a) the ESC "onrez" browser has quickly gained a reputation for crashing PCs and Macs left-right-and-centre and (b) there's now a riot going on among those who've contributed open source patches to the official SL client, who didn't realise Linden Labs would be "licensing" their work to companies like ESC. Given the SL TOS has already been ripped apart by a recent court case, I give it a couple of weeks until we see legal action over the "disclaimer" LL requested contributors to the open source project to sign ...
Posted by: Jay | October 25, 2007 at 06:50 PM