If your kid’s obsessed with Webkinz and Club Penguin but you can’t get them to do their chores, you may want to take a look at a new entrant into the virtual worlds scene called Handipoints.

Founder Viva Chu started Handipoints in January 2007 with the notion that chore charts would be both more fun and more effective if they were moved online. So he created a site with two main parts: one that helped parents track how their kids helped out around the house, and another that consisted of a virtual world on par with the other pseudo-3D services kids have come to enjoy.

These two parts work closely with one another to create sufficient incentives for kids to do their work. When kids successfully complete activities (such as cleaning their room, taking out the trash, or even brushing their teeth and eating an apple), they gain either of two types of points: so-called “handipoints” that can be redeemed for real-world items such as Nerf guns and toys; and “bonus points” that can be used to buy virtual goods in the online world. Parents determine which type of point, and how many of them, is rewarded for good behavior.

Setting up a system for kids to redeem points for physical goods (or money) was easy enough; all they had to do was hook up Amazon’s APIs and create a custom storefront. But a significant effort has gone into creating an entirely new and appealing virtual world, one that’s replete with different settings, activities, items, and other users.

Like Webkinz, kids can walk around the virtual world and talk to each other using canned chat (where you pick statements from a list instead of typing them). This prevents inappropriate behavior. The graphics are impressive and the functionality is rather sophisticated. In addition to buying items and socializing, users can play in-world games and watch movies (these require points, too).

Handipoints has raised $800k from Charles River Ventures and several angels – Keith Rabois, Georges Harik, Gady Nemirovsky, Robert Fanini, and Aydin Senkut. It’s been in beta since November 2007 and has gained 150k users so far, with 3.5 users per family on average (that breaks down into 1 parent and about 2 kids). Most of the service’s virtual goods are free, but the company plans on making money through selling premium goods to parents who want to make them available for their kids.

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In its alpha state, this virtual world is simply a chat widget with some avatars you can walk around the screen with the click of a mouse. You can chat in real time with other people on the network and walk into a variety of themed worlds (chat rooms) with different features. It’s also obviously targeted toward kids, with its fuzzy-looking avatars and chat profanity blocker.

The more complex functionality includes friending, profiles, fame, and items. Each world has an object or character you can interact with (dancing stones, little monster, arcade games). Although, you can unlock more worlds and features by inviting more users.

However, their widget strategy strikes me as odd because it flies in the face of the safety centered walled gardens other kid oriented sites have built to keep kids safe (Club Penguin, Webkinz, and others).

Update: RocketOn updated us, stating that the widget below was part of an experiment in October of last year. Also, the company says “we’re not targeting kids. I know those initial avatars look very Club Penguinesque, but when you see the full system, it will become clear that we’re going for teens and up (15+).” We’ll see how it evolves when the final product is released.

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South Korean company NHN comes with strong credentials. The company is claimed to be the be “the leading internet company” in its home market and has a huge gaming presence in Japan and China, with the company claiming 170 million registered gamers in China. Its US arm NHN USA Inc launched the ijji.com gaming portal in 2006, and since this time its grown to high levels, with Alexa counting the site at 580, but notably 256th spot in the US (yes yes, Alexa cant be trusted etc.., but sites don’t get this high on Alexa without some traffic).

Ijji.com offers a variety of games including traditional titles such as Poker and Chess, and then site specific games including a warfare game by the name of Soldier Front, a shooter called Gunz and a couple of other games. I’d read about their driving game “Drift City” on Something Awful this weekend so this was my starting point.

Casual Gaming

Most people would presume that casual gaming would equate to quick to play, but with Drift City the word casual is someone’s idea of a joke. First up was the site telling me that I needed to be using IE 7 to play the game (no mention of Windows, but that’s a given), so I switched across to a virtual machine running Windows to get started.

The next hurdle: a 700mb + download. Why you need IE7 when the game runs on its own software is beyond me. Ijji.com also scrimps on a decent server to handle downloads; I may only have a 2mb cable connection but the 700mb took nearly 4 hours to download via a Windows installer program that gave no indication of download speeds or how long it would take. The only option on the download was to turn off P2P sharing, which warns you that if you turn it off your download will be slower, how wasn’t explained but it never takes me that long to download something off BitTorrent for example so perhaps others weren’t using this option.

Then there is a number of screens during installation, and it attempts to install something called XFire, a gamers communication device that isn’t necessary for the game, I hit cancel on this one and finally got to the game itself.

Game play

This is a free game so you wouldn’t expect top level graphics, and you don’t get them. It feels a little bit like the classic arcade game Outrun, which if you’re old enough to remember the game isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

You start with a standard car which you can drive around a city scape which is apparently on some sort of mining focused island in the North Pacific (I tuned out during the intro screens). Like say Second Life or similar virtual worlds you can communicate with other members. Driving itself is as hard as using your arrow keys, and all cars are automatic so there’s no gear shifting. Control gives your car “boost” powered which as the name suggests makes the car go faster, and SHIFT allows you to drift around corners ala The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift.

Beginners are presented with tasks that involve driving to one point, picking up an item (by driving over the target area) then returning to base. You do this in an environment which is rich with other users and computer controlled cars as well. Half the fun is driving into other users and things, although you lose “boost” power by doing so.

After getting past a certain point, users can upgrade their cars, change colors and take on new tasks such as special deliveries, goals that earn you money for upgrades etc..

At this point you also have the ability to race other members. The social side of the game allows you to join with other members in teams and participate together. Races offer a variety of challenges other different courses.

Overall

It took me soo long to actually get to the point of having Drift City running that I was prepared to rip shreds into the game and NHN for it, but having eventually got online and played Drift City for a while I actually enjoyed it. It’s not going to appeal to a generation raised on cutting edge computer gaming but for those a little older (and the installation process aside) it’s a bit of casual fun.

Is it however the future of casual gaming? Ijji.com’s offering are a step above the true online casual gaming offered by startups such as Kongregate, but they’re got a much lower barrier to entry than say Second Life or Project Entropia. Many of the low graphics (mostly 2D) virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel target kids (and usually girls) where as Ijji.com has an older masculine target audience and offer games that don’t require an ongoing presence or commitment to succeed. If Alexa can be believed this isn’t the future of casual gaming, it’s the now of casual online gaming, and it will likely find a growing audience.

The following video was put together by Something Awful (who rated the game -27), it doesn’t give the full gist of the game but like any Something Awful video it has its moments.

(second screen shot credit: Something Awful)

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If you felt a little green with envy when Disney bought juvenile virtual world Club Penguin for $700 million in cash and earn out, this could be your chance to grab a piece of the virtual pie.

WhuddleWorld, Inc., creator of eponymous online hangout for kids WhuddleWorld, was forced to shut down in April after running out of money. The team of five that built WhuddleWorld over the last year and a half is soliciting acquisition and partnership offers to get the immersive world back online.

Co-founder Dee Hardrath claims that at the time of shutdown WhuddleWorld had grown to 76,000 registered members and a monthly page view count of 20M. She also says the company still receives emails four months later from loyal followers pleading them to get the world back into operation.

Interested in investing? Drop them a line. Perhaps you will be the one to pull them out of the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Check out our recent roundup of virtual worlds for information about the competitors in this space.

Update: Additional materials regarding the WhuddleWorld business plan and its pre-shutdown traffic have been posted below in comment #21.

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Virtual hangouts are where people can engage each other using imaginary characters in imaginary environments. They have been around and popular in Europe and Asia for years. However, they appear to be gaining traction in the United States as of late. Some commentators even believe that the type of experience provided by these destinations could very well become integral to the forthcoming Web 3.0 era.

The newly released MultiVerse platform, which is designed for the creation of online 3D worlds, certainly anticipates a future in which developers demand the tools necessary to build niche virtual communities because such communities have gone mainstream.

Currently, virtual hangouts differentiate themselves by targeting particular audiences and providing certain types of immersive experiences.

Destinations such as Club Penguin and Barbie Girls cater to children and pre-teenagers with their simple user interfaces, basic games, and cartoon graphics. Other immersive worlds such as Second Life and Habbo Hotel shoot for a broader audience by providing more advanced chat capabilities, more realistic simulations of reality, and tools to design objects and surroundings. Then there is Red Light Center (NSFW), which targets mature adults to give them an altogether more explicit breed of entertainment.

The worlds meant for children are designed with a concern for the safety and security of their users. Webkinz, for example, only lets users chat with a preselected assortment of phrases so no one can say anything inappropriate or share personal information. The services meant for general audiences lack such restrictions and theoretically can be enjoyed by all types of people, although this freedom often translates into behavior that would be utterly inappropriate for children. Second Life, for example, does not explicitly promote adult behavior but has become notorious for it nonetheless. Embracing the more voluptuous side of human behavior, services like Red Light Center are professedly all adult, all the time and encourage users to participate in explicit behavior.

Virtual hangouts range not only in the audiences they target but also in the level of immersion they provide. Some, such as Second Life and Active Worlds, put you in 3D-rendered environments with first person points of view in an attempt to approximate virtual reality. Others, such as Gaia (“the world’s fastest growing online world hangout for teens”) and Barbie Girls, use sprites (two-dimensional pre-rendered figures) to provide a bird’s-eye view of characters moving around in largely static settings. Even further down the immersion scale, the “worlds” of certain services such as Cyworld and Neopets are produced simply using HTML images and Flash animations.

Hangouts intended for younger audiences are generally less immersive than those meant for more mature audiences. Perhaps the only reason for this lies in a child’s inability to navigate more complex simulated worlds. However, children and pre-teenagers may also get something entirely different out of virtual hangouts than adults. While adults are presumably drawn to these services because they provide the opportunity for escapism, younger audiences may treat these products as interactive cartoons and toys. Thus, while all of these services provide a similar opportunity to hang out virtually, they may possess fundamentally distinct appeals for different demographics. The variety in immersion levels will probably continue to reflect these differences.

The chart in this post provides a basic comparison of these services to convey the range of virtual hangouts that currently exists. It should be noted that we tried to draw a distinction between online worlds where people hang out and worlds where people play role playing games, as is the case with World of Warcraft and Entropia Universe.

The following services are included in the chart:

• Active Worlds
• Barbie Girls
• Club Penguin
• Cyworld
• Dubit
• Faketown
• Gaia
• Habbo Hotel
• IMVU
• Kaneva
• Millsberry
• Mokitown
• Neopets
• Red Light Center (NSFW)
• Second Life
• There
• Webkinz
• Zwinktopia

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The company, which launched in October 2005, has 700,000 current paid subscribers and 12 million activated users, primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

The WSJ says the purchase price is $350 million in cash. Disney could pay up to another $350 million if certain performance targets are reached over the next couple of years, until 2009.

We mentioned Club Penguin a couple of months ago when a competitor launched from IAC called Zwinktopia. The company is killing it – projected revenues of $65 million in 2007 with $35 million in profit. Having nearly 50% bottom line margin is exceptional.

I recently spoke to an exec of one of the companies that took a long look at Club Penguin before deciding to pass. They said the charitable donations were a big factor in passing. He also mentioned that much of the success of the company was driven by movies such as Happy Feet. How much longer are penguins really going to be the cool thing, he wondered.

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We mentioned Club Penguin last month when a competitor launched from IAC called Zwinktopia. The company is killing it – projected revenues of $65 million in 2007 with $35 million in profit. Having nearly 50% bottom line margin is exceptional. The company has around 500,000 active users.

A stumbling block in the negotiations appears to be a disagreement over charitable contributions. Club Penguin donates a significant portion of profits to charity and wants this policy to continue post-acquisition. Sony reportedly isn’t hot on the idea.

Club penguin is a virtual world for young kids. Sony may see significant synergies by tying it into their Playstation platform. Other bidders that were in talks until very recently reportedly include AOL, Disney and Viacom.

This is good news for Club Penguin’s virtual world competitors as well – which broadly includes Second Life, Runescape, Gaia, Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Neopets, Webkinz and others.

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