Filed under: Digital Adoption by Digado

Here are 9 reasons to believe we have not seen the last of the metaverse yet, drawn from an excellent article in the Guardian, and distilled by Neil Perkin on this interesting marketing and communications blog.

1. The Swedish virtual world Entropia Universe had a turnover of $365,000,000 last year
2. Habbo Hotel has about 7 million regulair users (about the population of London) and 80 million sign ups.
3. Gartner Research predicts that by 2011 nearly 80% of all broadband users will have an avatar.
4. China is currently investing $30 Billion dollars in a 100 square kilometre site that will house the infrastructure (server farms, electricity, transport logistics etc) to host nine or ten virtual worlds, each of them capable of supporting over 150 million avatars. The underlying strategy of why they are doing this is ’strictly economic’.
5. Huge virtual world populations such as South Korea’s 43% penetration in the virtual realm of Cyworld means every consumer based brand wants a presence there
6. There is a total of over 50 virtual worlds up and coming, competing for supremacy. This pushes the development and standards of metaverses on a daily basis.
7. Corey Bridges, co-founder and exec producer of Multiverse (a company that provides virtual worlds for others and charges only when they make a profit), believes that virtual worlds will be bigger than the entire entertainment industry is now. “Virtual worlds are instantaneous while Facebook is timelagged” he says.
8. Diageo has reported that 90% of employees who took part in virtual meetings thought it better than similar real life occasions. Corporations including BP, IBM and Diageo are already using virtual worlds to enable remote working and hold meetings saving hundreds of thousands of pounds in travel and employee time. IBM already has 5,000 people working virtually and is exploring ways of making different worlds inter-operable.
9. Virtual Worlds are helping science, by enabling scientific, academic and technology communities dispersed around the world to work better together. The UK National Physical Laboratory has recently backed the launch of ‘Nanotechnology Island‘ in Second Life to serve just such a purpose.

Posted on: November 23, 2007 | Share on: