What do you do when you don’t want to become ‘just another player’ in the battle over the metaverse? You start by adopting the most incredible graphics engine available, create a plausible setting to put your community building efforts into context, create amazing visuals and concept art to grab the attention (a tactic commonly employed by the hugely successful Blizzard), and get a ‘Visual Futurist celebrity’ involved in your content creation. You end up with attention, anticipation, context, a story, and huge potential.
Today Avatar Reality Inc. announced their (3rd party) partnership with Virtual Space Entertainment (VSE - and don’t you just love their slogan ‘everything else is just reality’?), a virtual world developer, to provide the first attraction on the soon to be inhabited planet of Mars. The virtual version that is, within Avatar Reality Inc’s platform ‘Blue Mars’. VSE is led by Syd Mead who calls himself a ‘visual futurist’ and has an impressive portfolio (some of the highlights are the movies Bladerunner and Startrek - The motion picture). Avatar Reality Inc. runs a third party program, inviting developers of 3D content to join in on the ‘cultivation’ of Mars.
Buts its more than just content creation, its about building truly unique content on a professional level that could easily serve as an ‘attraction’ to anyone with a slight interest in the future. The developers are challenged to think about the future, and VSE has promised their city will allow visitors to experience “the future of entertainment, social networking, commerce and education. Retail shopping centers, entertainment venues, museums and more will give visionary entrepreneurs the best commercial opportunities of the 22nd century.”.
I love the approach Blue Mars has taken to their virtual world development. It’s remarkable, it’s refreshing, and it’s certainly risky. I really just wish they did more with it the potential of building a ‘mainstream’ attraction than I’ve seen on their website and press releases so far. Why not build this futuristic platform for experiencing the real future - much like the ‘Space Collective’. A collaborative community providing content for an ever expanding ‘must see attraction’, a new type of themepark where the audience is as much a part of the story as the developers are…
Blue Mars is to be released near te end of 2008 as a ‘massive multiplayer virtual world’ - something in which I hope the ‘MM’ of massive multiplayer will be secondary to providing a rich experience, context (the ‘real’ future) and content (attractions). The proven ‘game niche’is already convinced, now lets see if ‘experiencing the future’ is a persuasive application for a larger type of market.
Posted on: August 6, 2008 | Share on:
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Client versus Browser Part II | Digado said on August 9th
[...] quality than JAVA and Flash could offer now, which is especially visible in the case of blue Mars. Blue Mars is a virtual world that will most likely need a large download and therefor create a large barier [...]