Sibley Verbeck is moving past Second Life. The CEO of the Electric Sheep Company has made a lot of money creating virtual islands in Second Life for big brands such as CBS, Showtime, and Intel. But now he is ready to bring those virtual worlds to the Web in regular browsers. Today, he is releasing WebFlock, a Flash-based 3-D virtual world application he is offering as a hosted software service.
WebFlock worlds are private-label virtual environments targeted at big brands who want to have a 3D presence online that is more accessible than worlds like Second Life, which require a separate software download. Although we’ve seen $345 million invested in virtual-world startups so far this year, there is a definite trend of those worlds moving into the browser. For instance, recently launched virtual-world startup Vivaty is all browser based, and Google is experimenting with Lively, its own browser-based virtual environments.
None of those other efforts, though, are Flash-based. They only work on Windows machines (because they tap into ActiveX). WerFlock worlds are viewable in any browser that supports Flash (i.e., nearly all of them). It supports 3D avatars, chat, virtual currencies, games, and embedded images and videos from YouTube and other parts of the Web.
Verbeck is offering WebFlock as a hosted service to the same types of big brands he creates virtual islands for on Second Life. For instance, his first customer is Showtime’s The L-Word, which already has one of the most popular Second Life islands (created by Electric Sheep). By bringing that same virtual environment to the browser, Showtime thinks it can reach a much bigger portion of its audience.
Verbeck took the same underlying technology Electric Sheep uses to create other virtual environments, called Aspen, and is now applying it to browser-based worlds. He envisions these 3-D worlds as standalone places integrated into different Websites. Connecting them together would make them more interesting.
WebFlock does not come cheap. A ‘basic implementation,” which includes a 3-D space, avatars, and basic features, will cost “under $100,000″ for 12 months. And he is not abandoning his Second Life business entirely, but this new emphasis shows that he sees that the writing is on the wall for virtual worlds that are closed off (or at least hard to get to) from the rest of the Web.
Virtual worlds like Second Life have a silo issue—they are virtual worlds unto themselves. Today, Linden Lab (which operates Second Life) and IBM announced that they have successfully bridged two virtual worlds, with avatars from Second Life successfully “teleporting” to an entirely different metaverse based on an OpenSim server.
The two companies have been working together on the Open Grid Protocol to allow for interoperability between virtual worlds. In a post on the Second Life blog, Hamilton Linden explains:
An open standard for interoperability based on the Open Grid Protocol would allow users to cross freely from one world to another, just as they can go from one Web site to another on the Internet today.
Here’s a video showing the avatars “teleporting” from one world (i.e. set of computer servers) to another:
Interoperability between virtual worlds is fine, and is definitely a step towards breaking down the walled gardens they are increasingly finding themselves in. But ultimately it is the wrong answer. What we really need is interoperability between virtual worlds and the Web.
Otherwise, virtual worlds will remain isolated in their alternate universe. If you can’t link to it from the regular Web (and vice versa), it doesn’t exist. That is why virtual 3D worlds are going to come to the browser. One startup, Vivaty (which launched in public beta earlier today), is already creating these browser-based virtual environments, where each place and object is a regular URL.
These still pale in comparison to what you can do in Second Life, but they will get better. And being connected to the rest of the Web will ensure that they never have any interoperability issues. The Web will just become more 3D over time. Will Second Life join the Web, or will its legacy architecture (built when there was no other choice) prevent it from doing so?
Move over Second Life. The 3D Web is starting to make inroads into the plain old browser. By “plain,” I mean only Internet Explorer on Windows machines—which for now is what you need to experience Vivaty Scenes. But at least it’s a start. (Firefox support on PCs is coming in a few weeks, but Mac support is being pushed off further).
Vivaty Scenes is launching today in public beta on AIM and in Facebook. These are realistic rooms that act as virtual personal environments—a 3D version of your personal page. You can set the theme, decorate with furniture and other virtual goods, and chat with the avatars of friends who enter your room (they need to install the app as well). The best part is that you can bring in photos from Flickr and Facebook, or videos from YouTube and display them on screens in your room. You can play MP3 songs as well.
The graphics are a cut above what you’d find in pre-teen virtual-world social networks like Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, or Cyworld. They are more along the lines of Second Life or a Sims videogame. Vivaty is backed by Kleiner Perkins and Mohr Davidow. It raised $9.2 million in August, 2007, and a $200,000 seed round before that. Says CEO Keith McCurdy:
We are enabling full-featured 3D experiences inside a Web browser, instead of a separate application like Second Life. Every virtual environment—we call them scenes—is a URL.
That could be a game-changer if Vivaty’s platform takes off. It is deep linking into the 3D Web. Since they have regular URLs, each 3D scene can be linked to from the regular Web. Even objects within each room can each have their own URL. That is what is exciting about Vivty Scenes. It is extending the Web to 3D environments. Vivaty Scenes work only with AIM and Facebook for now, but they can work with other services such as iGoogle, My Yahoo, or as standalone Web pages.
Here is a demo video that shows what you can do in a Vivaty Scene. Remember, this is all browser-based.
McCurdy used to be the VP of worldwide technology at Electronic Arts, where he started Ultima Online. But he thinks that treating virtual worlds like a big online videogame is a mistake. Making a dig at the parcel approach used by Second Life to distribute and develop virtual land, McCurdy notes:
If you wanted to build the original 2D Web, you wouldn’t build it knowing the exact size of every Webpage. The beauty of the Web is that it is an unknown number of links.
While Vivaty is hosting all the rooms to begin with, its technology is architected to become distributed, like the Web itself. Vivaty Scenes are created using standard Javascript and PHP, and can be hosted on standard Web servers. McCurdy doesn’t want to create another walled garden. He wants to bring the Web into the 3D world.
The way he plans to make money is to become the virtual “cash register” for all the virtual goods he expects will be traded between Vivaty users. He also thinks there are obvious advertising opprotunities, including videos on the in-room screen, posters, and billboards, virtual product placement. It would be similar to videogame advertising, except that it need not be disconnected from ad campaigns on the Web.
The big money, though, could be in branded scenes and Websites. For instance, today Target is launching its own Vivaty-powered Facebook application called the Target and Coke Zero Virtual Dorm Room. It’s a back-to-college thing where students can play around with furnishing and decorating their own rooms. The gallery of virtual items features products that can be found at Target, of course.
This sorts of virtual-world advertising hasn’t worked that well because it was disconnected from the regular Web and people’s social networks. Vivaty hopes to prove that, given the right context, this kind of branding can thrive. We’ll see.
EA-Land, the service previously known as The Sims Online will shut August 1, despite a much hyped revamp announced late February.
The Sims Online was generally regarded to be a failure for EA, with the company unable to turn the success of The Sims franchise into an online hit. The service wasn’t helped by a complete lack of customizable features (outside of the usual Sims customization tools) and EA charged for access.
The new (but now never to be launched) EA-Land was to be EA’s second shot of success, and promised Second Life style customization and land ownership, with a free client and free to use service.
EA didn’t provide a full explanation for the shutdown, only saying that “The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena.”
Paying users of the Sims Online are being offered a $15 gift voucher and three months premium access to Pogo.
HiPiHi, China’s answer to Second Life has opened its doors to the public with a beta test that includes free features. We first wrote about HiPiHi in August 2007 when the company called for the establishment of virtual world standards and interoperability.
German’s are famed for their ability to clone sites, but the Chinese aren’t far behind; HiPiHi looks and feels like Second Life, at least in the demonstration video (in Mandarin above). HiPiHi is available in Chinese and English, and name registration supports both character sets. The service is free to use and register, and like Second Life users can rent land and create their own items.
According to the Second Life Herald, HiPiHi is working with Intel and IBM towards building the platform architecture so that it “is more open, highly scalable and truly inter-operable, in order to lay the groundwork for the mainstreaming of virtual worlds.”
PC only, and although the service is available in English, the download page isn’t.
EA is relaunching The Sims Online as a free service with a new name and new features, including UGC, commerce and land ownership.
EA-Land is the new, free Sims Online (TSO). The 12 different cities from TSO are being moved to EA-Land and the game area is being expanded to be “100 times bigger than the previous size of any city.” Existing TSO users will be able to purchase land in EA-Land before the new (reincarnated) world is open to the public with paying TSO users becoming “EA-Land subscribers” in a similar fashion to the way Linden Lab charges for land in Second Life.
Users of EA-Land will have the ability to upload custom content and (more importantly) buy these customizations from other players. Sounding a lot like Second Life? It gets better:
We heard from the community that the economy was broken in TSO. That was true, too many users were billionaires, and the goal of the game was mostly about extracting money from Maxis. I can now say with satisfaction that we have fixed the economy on EA-Land. This took many features, from establishing a real estate market, where users can easily buy or sell lots to one another, and a dynamic object pricing market where the prices of objects purchased from maxis is based on supply and demand, enabling stores and entrepreneurs to earn a living. We also enabled users to buy simoleans directly from Maxis. While there is no need for users to do so in the game (we give subscribers simoleans every week), it can help new users build their dream house faster with a simple paypal transaction secured by us.
There is one significant difference though to Second Life: EA-Land won’t become the wild west as EA will be “approving all of the content [so] this user content is safe to be viewed by everyone.”
Second Life fans will point out that TSO/ EA-Land has a lot of difference to Second Life in terms of capabilities, and that is true. And yet really basic 2D service such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel have millions of users compared to Second Life’s 100-200,000 regular users over a 60 day period. As much as I hate the name, free is a great selling point and EA-Land has the potential of catering to users who want something more from their online words than the basic services, without the hassles of Second Life.
Linden Lab has announced that virtual banking within Second Life is to be banned effective January 22 after receiving multiple complaints by Second Life residents scammed by bank operators.
Banking and associated services have become popular in Second Life over the last two years, with many offering ponzi style interest schemes that usually sounded too good to be true. Ginko Financial was the best known failure amongst Second Life banks, owing 200 million Linden ($750,000) to depositors when it declared itself insolvent in August 2007.
In a post on the Second Life blog, Ken Linden said that as well as not being able to provide protection to Second Life users with these banks running, their legality under law is also questionable. The decision is unlikely to affect virtual stock exchanges but may affect groups such as Second Life credit card provider Metacard, who also previously offered bank services as well.
Second Life banks are experiencing a run on their funds as customers seek to get their money before the ban comes in place. Companies such as JT Financial have been inundated by customers wanting to know what is going on. Screen shot of the JT Financial crisis meeting below.
Banking joins bestiality and gambling on the banned in Second Life list.
The Electric Sheep Company, regarded by many to be the leading Second Life development company, has parted company with one third of its workforce (22 people).
The Electric Sheep Company is best known recently for its work in creating the CSI:NY build in Second Life. The company offers its own Second Life browser “OnRez”, and provides services to companies looking to establish a presence in Second Life.
While the CSI:NY Second Life experiment has generally be regarded as a success by most, Electric Sheep Company was caught when some of the ridiculously high number of expected signups through the cross promotion did not materialize, causing much of the CSI:NY build to be closed down shortly after launching. Adding to this, according to Massively was the decision by AOL Pointe and Pontiac to cease operations in Second Life, both of who were Electric Sheep Company clients.
It would be easy to suggest that Electric Sheep Company’s failure here may be indicative of a broader downturn in Second Life; however, the more likely scenario is simply that this is a company that added too many staff in the expectation of ongoing and future work that didn’t happen, and they would be far from the first startup to be caught in this situation. Compound this with a highly competitive market and unfortunately for 22 people at the Electric Sheep Company, Christmas this year wont involve dreams of electric sheep.
Update: via the first commenter, Virtual World News has more, including an interview with the Electric Sheep Company where they state they’ll be moving into other virtual platforms including Metaplace, Multiverse and Icarus.
Eastern European nation Estonia has opened an official embassy in Second Life.
Estonia for those not aware of the country is a former Soviet Republic that this year is celebrating 90th anniversary of its initial independence, before it was invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. It’s bordered by Russia to its East and Latvia to the South, and became a member of the European Union in 2004, the same year it became an American ally by joining NATO.
Estonia established an embassy in Second Life on the basis that Second Life was as progressive as its own society. The goals of the embassy are to promote Estonia among small groups of professional individuals by hosting discussions and lectures with people who not be able to travel to Estonia, and perhaps more interestingly, to act as a conduit for information to countries where Estonia has no representation (literally a virtual embassy).
The embassy itself is an interesting build that’s hard to describe in words. The post-modernist architecture hosts a variety of levels that includes art work and meeting spaces. During my time at the embassy I was impressed to note that it was manned by a “Estonia Republic” representative. I didn’t ask for a visa or particular information about Estonia, but I’m sure that I could have.
In related news, those keen on the environment can participate in a virtual Bali conference, the current major conference being held to discuss the post Kyoto environmental treaty. The space is hosted by the Nature Publishing Group and includes speakers such as Tara LaForce of Imperial College in London, Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and George Monbiot, British enviro-nazi and enemy of Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame. Those interested can TP directly to the NPG island here (SLURL)
The news zone, where a traditional Estonian “Eesti hagija” dog welcomes you to the Embassy
I had the opportunity today to catch up with Chris Collins, the “Technical Assistant to the CEO” at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. A Commerce graduate from the University of Western Australia he started in tech, then like many locals (Vibe Capital, Mig33) headed off overseas. After working on his own startup 3 years ago in the Valley he fell in love with Second Life and landed a job as a Business Analyst with Linden Lab. More recently he took up the Technical Assistant to the CEO role, an interesting position in that it’s essentially an executive in training position. Collins shadows Linden Lab CEO Phillip Rosedale at all meetings and functions, and is also directly responsible for Lindex Exchange, the Linden Dollar to US Dollar currency service for Second Life. At the end of the position (6-9mths) he will then take up an executive role with Linden Lab.
The following from my notes of the interview, the answers may be paraphrased at times but the core answers are per my notes. I’d hoped to record it but the initial Skype call was unusable.
DR: There’s been a lot of talk about open source in virtual worlds, with talk of everything from virtual world interoperability, open standards and web based browsing. What’s Linden Lab doing to open up its doors?
CC: Firstly we’ve opened up our client. As a direct result of this we are seeing new and innovative ways of connecting to Second Life. There are already a number of browser based clients in development, and more recently we saw a custom browser built specifically for the CSI:NY program. We’ve also started to provide API’s that hook into Second Life; registration is one area that provides Second Life registration capabilities to other sites, for example Telstra in Australia now provides registration from its Bigpond/ SL page.
DR: What about the Second Life world itself? Obviously the sale of server space is the bread and butter of Linden Lab’s business model; will you consider opening this up as well in future?
CC: Eventually we want to open up everything, every aspect of Second Life, but it’s a massive undertaking and it’s not something we can do overnight.
DR: Talking of servers, there has been rumors that we might start seeing Second Life game servers in other countries, specifically there was a rumor that Telstra in Australia would be hosting them. True or not true?
CC: We currently have around 6000 servers and they are all based in the United States. We are aware of the lag caused by people connecting from a distance, so we are looking at placing servers in other countries.
DR: stability is an ongoing problem for users of Second Life, and lately this seems to have gotten worse. Why? and what’s Linden Lab doing about it
CC: Our biggest focus at the moment is on stability and scalability. We’ve undergone incredible growth over the last 6 months and this has presented a huge challenge for Linden Lab. Stability is the key. Second Life and our backend is entirely unique so there is nothing else like it so it’s not a something that has a simple solution.
DR: We’ve seen companies such as IBM, Cisco and others use Second Life as a virtual meetspace, holding events, virtual recruiting etc.. and yet it’s always struck me as odd that a sim in Second Life can only handle 50-60 people at a time. What’s Linden Lab doing to address this aspect of the Second Life experience?
CC: We’re currently exploring ways of increasing concurrency on a server. This is related to our overall goals of stability and scalability, and like them Second Life in unique so it’s not easy to just provide it.
DR: Second Life has had its fair share of headlines this year for the wrong reasons. Gambling and age play come to mind. You’ve cracked down on gambling, but still there are stories relating age play in the press. What’s Linden Lab doing?
CC: Linden Lab has always had a policy against any activity in Second Life that is illegal. Linden Lab’s has cooperated and is cooperating with authorities in a number of countries.
DR: Someone once said to me that Second Life’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness, and that’s Linden Lab’s libertarian hands-off governance of in-world activity. Only in the last week has there has been yet another attack on Second Life financial institutions with L$3m reportedly stolen from one bank. Griefing is also on the rise, and has been known to interrupt many a meeting. Will Linden Lab step in, and if not, why not?
CC: We don’t encourage this sort of activity and we do have ways to reporting it. We’ve recently improved our community department who is able to deal with complaints of this nature. We are also going to introduce tighter registration requirements
DR: Are you able to elaborate on the registration requirements: credit card, drivers license, something like that?
CC: We have users in over 100 different countries and each country has different forms of identification. We’re still working on the best way of implementing verification that is inclusive of all legitimate signups no matter where they live.
Sibley Verbeck is moving past Second Life. The CEO of the Electric Sheep Company has made a lot of money creating virtual islands in Second Life for big brands such as CBS, Showtime, and Intel. But now he is ready to bring those virtual worlds to the Web in regular browsers. Today, he is releasing WebFlock, a Flash-based 3-D virtual world application he is offering as a hosted software service.
The Electric Sheep Company
Eastern European nation Estonia has opened an official embassy in 
