The Explosion in Virtual World Development: Follow the Money
Last Updated on Wednesday, 9 July 2008 08:28 Written by admin Wednesday, 9 July 2008 08:26
Development is booming in the metaverse, and Venture Capitalists are feeding the frenzy with $345 million invested so far this year. Here are a few of the more significant investments of the 2nd Quarter 2008 (click the table to expand).
Virtual Worlds Management has its finger on the pulse of this space. You can read their full reports for Q1 2008 and Q2 2008 online. The first quarter of 2008 saw $184 million invested in 23 virtual worlds-related companies and $161 million invsted in 16 virtual worlds-related companies in the 2nd quarter. (H/T to TechCrunch)
Google’s Lively
July 8 marked Google’s Lively. VWM has an indepth review here. Lewis Shepherd rounded up a few reviews this morning from GigaOm and the New York Times. On the plus side, the Lively team is working with an unlimited budget and has made the decision to outsource avatar and other virtual customizations to some really talented 3D partners. This could knock down a big barrier for entry to the multiverse for a lot of people. With Lively, you don’t have to know how to customize your avatar or build your environment. You just have to drag and drop from The Catalog. Check out the Lively video and decide for yourself.
Will A-SpaceX Move at the speed of Government?
I posted a few days ago about IARPA and their A-SpaceX project. I like the fact that their plans are ambitious and ground-breaking (which is IARPA’s remit, after all). I’m concerned about the length of time that it typically takes a government research agency to go from concept to proof-of-concept. Based on the number of players and the capital pouring into this space, I expect to see some major breakthroughs in 3D development before the year is out. By this time next year, my personal avatar may be doing research for me on the Web while I’m composing my next blog post. And where will the Air Force Research Laboratory be on A-SpaceX? Still mired in the BAA grant proposal process.
If the IC wants the benefit of cutting edge tools, it desperately needs to adopt an agile development process – particularly for its entree into virtual worlds.
[...] Original post by IntelFusion [...]