Conduit Labs, a yet-to-launch gaming virtual world, just closed a $5.5 million series A round with Charles River Ventures and Prism Venture Works. In addition to the financing, CRV’s Susan Wu and Prism’s Will Kohler have joined the company’s Board of Directors.
The details on the site are in flux and scarce. However, the service will be in the emerging space of “immersive online gaming meets social networking”. Their vision is to combine the best of social networking and online virtual world gaming, which Co-founder Nabeel Hyatt loosely termed as “Facebook meets World of Warcraft”. They don’t want to recreate a social network online, but rather marry existing networks (even perhaps Last.FM) with a 3D gaming experience. In the real world you can call up some friends and play a simple game of basketball. Conduit wants you to enable you to do the same thing easily online.
The product will be a 3D virtual world that runs on Flash through your browser. Once online you’ll get to connect with friends to play games. Flash will make the application more accessible than a lot of the existing 3D virtual worlds, which require long downloads. HiPiHi recently tried to help solve this problem by pushing for virtual world interoperability. They also want to make the games more accessible than existing online MMORGs aimed at hardcore gamers. The games aim to capture the casual social experiences of games like Wii Tennis or Guitar Hero.
The team behind Conduit Labs has a significant amount of experience with casual games and 3D worlds. Some of Conduit Lab’s co-founding members (Dan Ogles, Michael Sheidow, and Daniel O’Brien) served leading roles in creating games like Guitar Hero, Asheron’s Call, one of the first 3D massive multiplayer worlds, and the Lord of the Rings Online.
The company was founded by Nabeel Hyatt in April, while an entrepreneur in residence for Prism Venture Works in Boston, Massachusetts. They’re currently a team of 4, but will be expanding to 10 in the next 6 weeks.
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A new wave of flash based virtual networks/social networks after myminilife and myabodo is coming.
“immersive online gaming meets social networking”
Sounds similar to the online gaming experience that’s common in South Korea
Its impossible to do much with flash in 3d without hardware support. I’m skeptical, since with flash you can only do 3d using software. I’ll wait for the actual product. There is no way u can have large open worlds in 3d using flash without huge load times. Maybe cool mini games at most.
I’m skeptical that they will launch a fully immersive and interactive 3D experience using Flash. Maybe 2.5D but not 3D. Let’s wait and see.
Checkout vastpark. Open virtual worlds are already here.
Um,
Given that has never and still does not support 3D (in geek: there is no concept of “z” depth, perspectve, etc.) I don’t see how this can legitimately be announced as a 3D virtual environment.
Could someone please clarify.
Cheers,
Doug
Sounds a lot like Faketown.com. And per the comments above, flash does not support true 3D though it can be faked using pre-rendered graphics (heavy file size). There have been some experiments in simulating 3D via ActionScript but the results are mostly primitive.
Then again, with $5.5 million Faketown could probably find a way to port over to make flash render 3D too!
Just to be clear to everyone, Conduit’s fundamental innovation is around interaction, not around display technology.
To put it simply, the reason I am excited about this company, and the VCs were, was because of the fun - not because of some amazing actionscript code.
I actually don’t think I have said to any press person the words “3D” - not because what we are doing is not 3D - but because I don’t think dimensionality is the key to having an interesting, fun, immersive experience online.
I hope think we all learned that from VRML.
- Nabeel
PS- I love that Bart spams every single player in this space who gets a press mention so that he can mention Faketown. Keep pluggin Brad.
Find the video interview of Conduit Labs CEO and Co-Founder: Nabeel Hyatt
http://us.intruders.tv/index.p.....;preview=1