3pointD.com

Jordan Bigel (aka Second Life’s Dire Lobo) of metaverse development company InWorld Studios sends along the news that his company is launching a new movie service for the virtual world of Second Life. Set to premiere this Friday, 11 May, the service is known as InWorld Cinema and has some interesting features — and is opening with a full-length feature film. Audience members occupy individual “vPods” and access scenes or chapters within the film via a heads-up display. Tickets cost L$260 (about US$1) and let you spend as much time watching the movie in as many visits as you like over a 48-hour period.

For the launch, InWorld is featuring Loverboy with Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, and giving away free tickets starting at 8:00am SL Time (11:am Eastern) this Friday, 11 May. (Legal issue have presumably been covered, though neither InWorld’s press release nor its Web page mention them.

For now, InWorld’s »in-world cinema« is tiny, featuring a mere five vPods, but Jordan says he plans to open a larger cinema on the company’s private island in June.

Enabling chapter browsing as on a DVD is a nice touch, but there’s a way this service fails to take advantage of its context. It’s an individual viewing experience, not a social one. (Looks liek I agree with Rik Riel on this one.) Streaming a movie to a Web site would seem to work just as well (or probably better). The jury’s still out, of course, since it will be interesting to see what happens once InWorld opens its larger cinema. Then we’ll be able to start playing Six Degrees of Second Life with InWorld — which is actually one of the earliest metaverse services companies, though they haven’t been heard from in some time. Nice to see them back in the picture.