Interview: Metaversatility Offers Fast, Cost-Efficient Virtual World Prototyping

When Disney announced that its next slate of virtual worlds would cost millions of dollars instead of hundreds of millions, it seemed like a savings windfall from developing on its existing infrastructure. That’s still too much, though, for most entrepreneurs or even executives looking to convince the rest of their organization that a virtual environment is a sound investment. “Most people either need to sell [a virtual world] internally or need something to show investors or sponsors that will fund the development, which is usually a costly process,” explained Metaversatility Founder and CEO Peter Haik. “We are filling that gap with a new service offering of getting a standalone virtual world up in 6-to-8 weeks on a more modest budget--between $40,000 and $60,000.”

The company is already halfway through its first such project, with three more waiting in the wings, ranging from a social/commercial world targeted at a niche to show to investors to an educational world meant to be shown to school boards and state education supervisors to another aimed at demoing an entirely new way for users to create content.

The demo worlds are built on the Multiverse platform, and designed with standard tools and practices. If the project is picked up, the assets created for the demo can then be transferred to the final build and vice versa.

“Since it’s based on the professional tools and 3D models, they can use assets they already have,” said Haik. “Maybe building plans or other content they’ve created, because 3D is a pretty common thing. We can use some of the content, and any content we create for these worlds can be portable to other worlds because they are standard 3D models.”

As these are functioning worlds, they’re also suitable to be run behind a corporate firewall, offering more security and privacy than an office build in a public world. The company compares that to a commonly argued failing of Second Life, though yesterday's announcement that IBM is working with a private version of Second Life makes the playing field more competitive.

“They can handle 1000s of connections,”said Co-Founder and COO Adrienne Haik. “If all you need is a small space like a Second Life island, it could be complete for that. We provide basic avatars, some custom art, and maybe one custom piece of functionality, but other than that they tend to be fairly limited because the idea is to get it out quickly and on a low budget.”

All the builds are meant to be scalable, though, and ready to be expanded from an Alpha project to a fully serviceable working environment.

An additional advantage that Metaversatility sees is that the project will slowly add more and more content to a network of 3D worlds, creating a groundwork for a 3D Internet.

"For me it’s a bit of evangelizing of the 3D Web," said Peter Haik. "I personally see Multiverse as a solution to the 3D Internet in the way everyone wants it to be. It just needs a lot of content, but, functionally, it is pretty good. With each of these demos, we’re putting more content out there. That helps build awareness of the platform. We’re driving user adoption of Multiverse. That’s the only way to get something on the scale that the industry and, I think, everyone wants to see. We need a) the infrastructure and b) the content."

 

Metaversatility is exhibiting at Virtual Worlds 2008, Booth 1. On Friday morning, the company will also present findings from its research on brand perception in Second Life  with Orange.

Comments

[Jeeves]

$60,000 for a low-budget enterprise build? You've got to be kidding. I can see why a development shop might get excited about charging this much money for a few basic avatars and maybe one custom piece of functionality," but this is way too expensive for small to medium sized businesses during a recession.

The Internet took off because everyone could afford to put up their own web pages. Multiverse's price tag makes it unlikely that the platform will generate the sort of creative community that has grown up around Ubuntu, Second Life, and even Active Worlds. An open source implementation of the Second Life server is far more likely to catch on with the masses.

Prediction: One year from now, all of the virtual world conferences will be packed with people talking about interoperability, open standards, and the next wave of SL clients and servers.

Where is this all heading? On one side you have IBM/Linden's vision for accessible, ubiquitous virtual worlds. On the other side, you have Multiversatility's vision of a costly, proprietary metaverse in which $60,000 is the price for a budget build.

Hmmm... I wonder which vision is going to win....

[Rip]

Jeeves what you wanta bet that those people that dont go open source by the end of 2008 will not be around at the end of 2009?

[len]

Open source isn't the answer. It is still something only a code-head can love. Vivaty and Metaplace are showing how to do it.

Unless the standards are language-based, it is still an artist ghetto owned by the techno-geeks. They take the money and tell the 'user generated content' what a swell favor they are doing them by letting them post on their servers.

Qui bono?

[Peter Haik]

I think you're confusing the cost of content development with the cost of platform development and functionality. Building standalone worlds has previously cost millions of dollars.

These worlds will support thousands of concurrent users and could be considered an alpha release for something to compete with Second Life and other stand alone worlds. These worlds run behind a firewall and are much more stable than Second Life. These worlds provide many things that people looking to launch a world of their own need and do not currently have with existing service offerings.

In short, this isn't a service offering aimed at enabling users to create their own worlds (a topic I spoke about at the conference), but one aimed at opening up worlds to compete in the existing market.