NYT: China Recreation District to Connect Consumers and Manufacturers

The China Recreation District, which Entropia partnered with earlier this year, set out to create a national infrastructure for virtual worlds. Now it's aiming also to connect global consumers directly to the manufacturers in China that make so many of the world's products, reports the New York Times, with each "Made in China" label connecting individuals to a site for just-in-time manufacturing. ''This makes you have to think of China in a different way. We are stepping back and trying to blend the human and the computer to touch everything associated with people's lives, said Chi Tau Robert Lai, chief scientist of the virtual world, at the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo. [via NYTimes.com]

Lai concedes that individuals likely won't want to purchase a shirt online only to have it be made and delivered weeks later, but that if enough individuals order the same, inexpensive shirt, it suddenly becomes profitable for the manufacturers to create them at once and ship the next day.

The government, while taking a central role in the economy and social regulations, will apparently take a hands off approach to taxation for companies operating through the CRD.  Christian Renaud of Cisco told the Times that the central government gave China an infrastructure boost. Last week saw the first of a series of meetings on creating standards for virtual worlds, but it's not clear when, if ever, those will be set. The CRD, however, has deadlines.

''The beauty of it is they can create uniformity,'' Renaud said. ''In the United States, if you tried to get all the virtual worlds together, you'd still have Senate meetings on it 15 years from now.''