Borrowing a line from Rowan Derryth of Prim Perfect, “Second Life boobs will have a little more gravity this week!”

The Second Life community, Winterfell, has developed various in-world events which will benefit the Susan G. Komen Foundation to raise breast cancer awareness.  “Boobiethon” as it is called runs Oct 1 – today.  Events include an art action, several balls, a gypsy caravan & carnival, educational lectures on topics like The History of Undergarments (avatars attending were encouraged to wear their favorite corset or underpants) and tonight the week long festivities close with a Burlesque show.

Also in support of Breast Cancer Awareness month, Webkinz is promoting their October Pet of the Month, the Pink Poodle, along with a song called “I Dream in Pink” that will be sold through the iTunes Store.  Proceeds will be donated to breast cancer charities.

If you’ve been following my Virtual World posts you know I love my WeeMee; she is, of course, already donning her pink ribbon t-shirt in support.   Later in the month, Halloween!

~Melissa Hart, Account Supervisor

Melissa Hart, Account Supervisor

I particularly enjoy changing my “Wee Mee’s” outfits for the various holidays.  For Halloween my Wee Mee dressed up as a tropical fish complete with a jack-o-lantern candy bucket.  I was disappointed with the lack of holiday “clothes and accessories” selection for Thanksgiving so she donned a simple knit cap and a jacket.  For Christmas, my Wee Mee was decked out in a Ms. Claus outfit and accessorized with a poinsettia plant. After changing clothes and then saving the new Wee Mee, she interfaces in Wee World with other Wee Mees. She is also exported, by me, to several instant message chat programs where she chats with coworkers and friends.

This Christmas season I also played around with several Santa Tracking tools. Two mirror worlds were developed to track his movements in 3D: Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth, with help from NORAD.  Those on the go could keep track of Santa with Earthscape’s app for the iPhone. As Virtual World News noted this week, “with NORAD’s involvement, it’s easy to draw parallels to projects from the intelligence community used to visualize data in 3D environments, but, more importantly, happy holidays!”

Melissa Hart, Account Supervisor

Here is one of those “alerts”, released earlier in the month from Virtual Worlds Weekly, regarding Second Life and a notable increase in professional use versus personal use.

“The Social Research Foundation has released preliminary results of its first survey of a panel of 11,000 Second Life users, focusing on their activities and efforts in the virtual world. The respondents are self-selected, but very active in Second Life, with 31% spending 16 hours or more in world each week. Metanomics has an extensive early look at the results. One worth noting is that while respondents still favor using Second Life for personal activities like socializing or fun, there’s an increase in interest for professional use. That includes, though, networking, researching, and running a Second Life business as well as conducting real-life business. In fact, the first three generate much more interest currently: 198 of the 1258 respondents reported using Second Life for “any purpose related to your primary occupation”; That represents less than a quarter of their Second Life time, though 71 users reported spending over half of their time on their primary job. Users predict even less real-world work for themselves in 2009. That’s based on self-predictions, though, so it may not be representative of organizational interest to come. With an increased focus from Linden Lab on enabling organizational use and a product offering with Rivers Run Red aimed specifically at the enterprise, those numbers may change.”

Melissa Hart, Account Supervisor

More and more companies are using virtual worlds to strengthen their communication externally with customers and business partners and internally with employees. Many in attendance were of the opinion that in a few years virtual worlds as part of the enterprise application will be widespread and a part of most people’s daily corporate lives.

The enterprise session I attended featured a case study providing a detailed look at the U.S. Army National Guard’s Joint Training Directorate’s virtual world for collaboration, which is scheduled to launch next April. The collaboration tool will soon have virtual classroom capabilities and more, integrated across multiple agencies and emergency management organizations.

Emergency response personnel will be able to virtually train for a variety of emergency situations. The plan is to create training locations and military bases that accurately represent the terrain and skyline one would see if there in real life. (The National Guard found that people really wanted NYC to look like NYC, Baghdad to look like Baghdad, etc.) The National Guard worked with existing virtual worlds to leverage assets with the express intent to re-purpose imagery in order to keep development costs down.

One of the features they plan to implement that really caught my attention was the ability for families to log-in and upload files to deployed soldiers who were also logged-in. Children would be able to upload report cards, art work and photos via file share in order to instantly show their deployed parent.

Since the conference, an article has been written on how Forterra was recently awarded the contract to develop non-player characters for this virtual world, which is a relatively new idea for virtual worlds. Non-player characters will reduce the need for live roleplayers and trainers without sacrificing the engaging nature of the scenario when they are present. See the below article for more.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/09/army-taps-forte.html

Will be interesting to see the response once the world launches. Check back here for more info on this and other enterprise worlds/applications.

Melissa Hart, Account Supervisor

I recently came across an article that addresses what elements go into a successful virtual world. The key nuggets of the article are listed below:

Many virtual worlds suffer from great initial draw, but not enough compelling content to warrant an extended visit or repeat returns. The world looks great, but once visitors get a handle on the visual elements and navigation of the environment they get bored and leave.

What sorts of things keep people retained and engaged in virtual worlds?

1. Stimulation is important – things to do in-world. This might be games for certain demographics, entertainment for some and even education for others.
2. Fundamentally there needs to be relevance and a shared interest. Define the wants and needs from the target market that world is going after – no single world can appeal to everyone.
3. People attract people (crowd effect). Newbies will stay to check out what all the excitement is about and frequent visitors are returning as they are stimulated, find the site relevant and see that others do too.

Source: “50 Lessons In Virtual Worlds” KZERO.co.uk.blog/?cat=105

So if you are thinking about developing a virtual world be sure to keep the above in mind.

Melissa Hart, Account Supervisor