August 25th, 2007
In The Guardian, Vic Keegan discussed recent Gartner research indicating that – in four years’ time – 80% of internet users will have avatars working or playing online. Given the pace of internet adoption, and the fact that people often have more than one avatar, there will soon be more avatars than humans, at least in the industrialised world. While we agree with his thoughts on Google Earth and overall thesis, we are less bullish on Entopia Universe’s Chinese prospects given the rise of companies such as HiPiHi.
“…It is barely a year since SL [Second Life] came on to the public radar yet already there is an unstoppable momentum towards building more 3D worlds that will eventually be able to interact with each other, so an avatar in one can move in and out of a rival system.
The race to build a better virtual world is already leaving the Arctic land grab in the shadows. The winner could be Google Earth, which recently added photographs of streets to its zoom-in model of the planet. It already has 250 million users who add content and interact with each other. It doesn’t take a big leap of the imagination to envisage your avatar talking to friends and strangers in your own street in a few years’ time. But it faces big competition from others such as Entropia Universe, the Swedish virtual world that recently signed a deal with the Beijing municipality to build a virtual universe able to handle 7 million users at any one moment. The company believes virtual worlds could lead to people working from home in a big way. Since barely 50,000 of Second Life’s 9 million residents are online at any one moment, the same ratio of active to inactive users could make China’s virtual space bigger than most countries in the world. The company promises “stunningly realistic graphics, environmental physics and believable animations.”
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