Oddcast has made a business on supplying avatars that can be embedded on various websites, blogs, and social media pages for businesses and, through Voki, consumers. Now it's toying with a virtual world in Oddcast Avatar Chat. The service is available as a tech demo for now. The eventual aim, according to Mashable, is to provide branded environments for third parties. Right now they provide small spaces where you can navigate in 3D (in first- or third-person), chat with text-to-speech capabilities, and share media (though there's only a few pre-selected videos in the demo).
It's all Flash-based, so the offering will likely remain relatively limited, but Oddcast is already envisioning multi-user game shows as promotions and its potential as a customer service tool. Oddcast is apparently positioning it not as a virtual world in and of itself, but as a way for brands to increase engagement on their own sites.
Between those use cases and its low barrier to entry, it could be positioned as a challenge for the Electric Sheep's recently launched Webflock in creating white label environments. There's an increasing number of offerings aimed at similar ideas--creating no-download, embeddable virtual spaces forbrands--and I can see it picking up traction over the course of this year.
The idea benefits off accessibility, brand control, and the ability to target niche verticals or audiences, all of which have been cited as failings in the first wave of virtual worlds marketing (way back last summer) in broad worlds like Second Life. In fact, without the metaphor of the larger world around them, a lot of the conversation is even losing the rhetoric of virtual worlds. While "chat with avatars" has been tossed around as a term of derision for some virtual worlds, most recently with Google's Lively, Oddcast is owning it as an idea (and has been for a while).
I'm still sold on the benefits of a larger world for plenty of use cases--and when you're building a youth destination site it works especialyl well--but it seems like there are more and more groups who think brands will be sold on the idea that simpler is better. For many cases and audiences, especially older users who are excited about social options and passionate about brands, I expect they'll be right.
Oddcast Avatar chat opened in beta today and is targeted for a full launch later this year.
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