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The pre-lunch panel at VW07 was on “platforms and technologies,” moderated by Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company. Unfortunately, I chose to sit upstairs by the coffee, which apparently inspired most of the audience to chat to each other throughout the panel.

Pretty much the most interesting bit of this came at the very end, from Joe Miller, vp for platform and technology development at Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life:

• We’ll be open-sourcing the back end so sims can run anywhere on any machine whether trusted by us or not.
• We’ll be delivering assets in a totally different method that won’t be such a burden on the simulators.
• Very soon we’ll be updating simulators to support multiple versions so that we don’t have to update the entire Grid at once.
• We’ll be using open protocols.
• SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.

Joe also had a slide showing that SL is going to migrate straight to Havok 4. Eventually.

And now, back to our panel. (more…)

MTV also announced they’d be launching Virtual Pimp My Ride that will let users customize their virtual rides in Virtual Laguna Beach, as well as hold drag races and participate in other aspects of car culture. The world will build out a pretty good piece of Van Nuys as well as a superhighway that will connect VLB with Van Nuys, according to Matt Bostwick giving a keynote at VW07. Bostwick also said LogoWorld, the planned MTV world for lesbian and gay viewers, would be launched shortly as well. More details as they emerge. Just wanted to get the news out.

MTV’s latest addition to their virtual universe — which already includes Virtual Laguna Beach, the Virtual Hills, Nicktropolis and a planned music world, among others — will be a virtual version of MTV Cribs within VLB that will let users own apartments and trick them out more or less as on the television show, according to MTV’s Matt Bostwick, giving a keynote address at Virtual Worlds 2007. Few details were forthcoming, for the moment, but you can imagine what things will be like.

Bostwick also mentioned some current usage numbers for VLB and vHills:
MTV has registered 600,000 registered users in 6 months.
The median age is 20.
Users are 85 percent female, which is almost an exact footprint of the people watching the shows.

Bostwick said the network estimates they’ll have 3 million registered users by the end of the year.

He said 64 precent of users come back multiple times, they visit on average 1.4 times a week for 37 minutes a visit.

Bostwick also went over a couple of other new features being added to MTV’s virtual universe include, including:

• Click-through eCommerce, which will allow users to click through from virtual items in order to buy real-world versions of them.

• Skill ladders that will allow users to bewcome DJs, fashion designers or club promoters.

The first panel at Virtual Worlds 2007 was on Trends and Numbers, a general discussion of where things might be headed in terms of virtual worlds, moderated by Daniel Terdiman of CNET.

Panelists
Chris Collins, aka SL’s Logan Linden of Linden Lab
Joe Laszlo, senior analyst at Jupiter Research
Steve Prentice of Gartner Research
Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red
Sibley Verbeck, CEO and founder of the Electric Sheep Company

Sibley: We’re at a point of being still extraordinarily undefined. It still only gives you so much value to look at the metrics of where VWs are today, because the activity around them has been largely exploratory. There’s incredible interest in the potential. People are interested, but VWs are not yet a key part of their business. We have a lot of questions, but not yet a lot of answers.

Justin: We’re just at the point where VWs are being defined as their own medium. It’s not its own solution in its own right, but part of a mix of solutions.

Collins: Growth in Second Life membership we’re seeing now is incredible, especially from overseas.

Prentice: We’re pretty much where the Internet was in the mid-90s. People are interested, but they don’t quite know what to do. Describing it as a media channel is probably one of the most accurate ways of doing it. Corporates are starting to understand that this is a channel that needs to be used along with everything else. But they’re still isolated islands. You can’t yet move your avatar or your assets from one world to another, That’s one of the constraints. There’s only one Internet. Once you can move from one to another, the growth you see today will look pretty stagnant. (more…)