Slowly Crawling Out Of The Trough of Disillusionment

Based on Gartner's Hype Cycle public virtual worlds are in the Trough of Disillusionment (after the hype), but hold potential for the future. In fact, Gartner's latest predicts that public virtual worlds will see mainstream adoption within 2-5 years, so Virtual Worlds News reports on the basis of Gartner's report Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

There are signs that maybe we are coming out of that Trough of Disillusionment. The latest ones are some positive articles in important mainstream media such as The Economist and BusinessWeek, Second Life being associated with business and creativity... Even more remarkable, I discovered that projects which were once mentioned as examples of the failures of Second Life, are now being presented as interesting showcases.

The Economist is not kind for all virtual worlds: the article explains that Lively, Google's virtual world, has been a flop. The Economist:

(...)in the weeks since it opened its virtual doors, Lively has remained surprisingly lifeless, hosting a dwindling number of users and prompting a string of negative reviews.

Hardly anyone is using Lively, so The Economist says, and asked Greg Lastowka, an expert on virtual worlds at Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey, why that is the case. Lastowka gives a straightforward explanation: there is not much to do on Lively.

Second Life, he says, offers “commerce and creativity”, and Club Penguin (a popular virtual world for children, owned by Disney) has lots of built-in games.

BusinessWeek focuses on business and startups in Second Life. "Whether they're designing eco-homes or a new mass transit system, entrepreneurs are finding virtual worlds provide them with an inexpensive, low-risk launching pad", so the magazine says.

Examples given by BusinessWeek include Robert Curet, the owner of Little Wonder Studio in Burbank, Calif., who used Second Life to "sketching out a model and mechanisms for a windup toy and making a rough estimate of the size of the parts." Curet met in Second Life an engineer from a factory in Hong Kong to discuss the model.

Another example: Starwood Hotels & Resorts. They tested a new hotel concept called Aloft. "After a trial in Second Life, Starwood decided to put more seating in the lobby and install radios in the shower, among other changes."

Other enterpreneurs use the virtual worlds to build prototypes which they could not afford to build in the physical world, to experiment with ideas (like innovative mass transit systems) or to demonstrate services in a visually compelling way while those demonstratons were impossible in the physical world (video ad systems in crowded places).

The BusinessWeek article gives a balanced view of Second Life, also mentioning drawbacks such as privacy and security concerns or problems rendering details of prototypes.

Still, I do have some questions about the article. First of all, in the description of virtual worlds in general it is said that "nonexistent products" are being sold to "imaginary people". I wonder what there is so "nonexistent" or "imaginary" about for instance videogames or fiction movies or fiction books, and if those are considered "real products", why 3D-renderings making very real interaction possible should be considered fictitious.

To my surprise, BusinessWeek itself reported in June 2007 that Starwood Hotels was about to leave Second Life. "Companies thinking twice about the popular virtual world are finding more security and flexibility in alternatives", so the magazine reported at the time. It seems that the Aloft Island had been donated to TakingITGlobal. My avatar looked around in Second Life and could only find the Aloft Virtual Commons, I am not sure whether there is any link.
But what is interesting to note, is that a project which was mentioned in a doom-and-gloom story a year ago is now being presented as a positive example.