Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Play: One Year or Nothing

"You probably see Microsoft and think 'What? they’re not deeply involved in virtual worlds,'" said Daniel Schiappa, Microsot's General Manager for the Strategy Entertainment and Devices Division,  in the panel on Entertainment in Virtual Worlds at Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo. "We’re thinking about the space heavily and have been involved in a gaming aspect for quite some time. We see a wide variety of demographics in the space. Clearly we’re not in a traditional virtual world other than what’ve done with Reuben [Steiger, CEO of Millions of Us] here. But from a typical Microsoft play of a heavily branded entertainment space, we haven’t gotten there yet.  But hopefully next year you’ll know why I’m here."

"I think from a Microsoft perspective, we’re still looking at how to marry the socialization with some entertainment," Schiappa explained later in the panel. "Until you hit scale where 20 of my friends of there, there has to be a reason for my friends to show up in the first place. This market is nascent, and there’s so much out there for us to digest. Our project is large scale for what we want to do across the entertainment medium."

On that project, Schiappa later hinted to Cox News that Microsoft did have a "strategic plan" and was looking at a virtual worlds play that would connect all of its devices, mobile, PC, and console.

“If a year from now we don’t have anything, then we probably won’t have anything,” he concluded.

Schiappa might have been overly modest about Microsoft's current role in virtual worlds. The company integrated GoPets with Windows Live Messenger over the summer for a  fairly easy, immediate virtual world connection.

On the console side of things, Home for the Playstation3 is obviously the leading  gambit for a console-based virtual world, though it was just delayed until the Spring of 2008, giving Microsoft a little more time to get involved.

Its bigger play, though, likely comes from  Microsoft Virtual Earth as an alternative to Google Earth. Over the summer Microsoft announced a partnership with Dassault Systèmes 3D modeling techniques to "add an entirely new level of realism within Virtual Earth, providing an unrestricted freedom for creativity and innovation."

And in September, we spoke with representatives from Allegorithmic, the company providing the texturing technology behind the DS partnership. President Sebastien Deguy explained that the intitiative came from Microsoft's desire to compete in the space: "Microsoft didn't have a way to do content, and Google Earth didn't have textures," he said. "Virtual Earth wanted high resolution textures." 

Allegorithmic was looking at ways to make those textures interoperable with other platforms, and Microsoft was present at last week's virtual worlds interoperability meeting.

So  while there's always the chance that Microsoft will have nothing in a year's time, the signs are definitely pointing the other way.