A window on the Virtual World

The latest real news from the virtual world is that Samsung have ported the SL client onto their high end mobile device, or so Richard Banks comments on his blog. This allows us to walk talk and blog in first life and Second life all at the same time. I guess this make its 1.5 life or even 3rd life. However this is not the first time that a commercial virtual world vendor has attempted to exploit the mobile device, Habbo announced this with Nokia back in November, and Microsoft (In my mind the organisation most capable to achieve this) have a work stream in
their social computing research group to do a similar thing.

The consumer device and media industry's view is that this is a good thing. The media companies, virtual world companies and mobile carriers all get new exciting ways to make money from the teen demographic. The only losers are traditional mass media companies, more time in a virtual world consuming media is less time in this buying disks that become obsolete as you take them out of the packet.

At the Barcelona TV evolution event last year I heralded "personification of consumer devices", where the operator would invite the consumer to interact with the device as if the device were a person, this is already happening with some online media brands but has yet been translated to a physical device dependant brand. Software developments that allow small devices to perform the polygon rendering needed to make a virtual world an exciting experience will ultimately unlock the mobile device allowing it behave as window onto another world, or a character that you can interact with directly.