See, instead of spending millions of dollars on recruitment advertising no one will actually see, the IRS instead spent thousands of dollars to create an IRS Careers Island in Second Life which no one will actually see. That’s much cheaper! I actually visited the island as soon as I heard about this, and one can definitely see how they saved millions. It’s a bunch of booths with clickable information signs, and a couple of lounges with some very pretty penguin clip art that must have cost them a small fortune to secure.

Frank Stipe, Virtual Worlds & Social Networking Project Manager for the IRS, explains why the IRS needs a Virtual Worlds & Social Networking Project Manager.

In the physical world, we could spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on sponsoring a race car that displays our brand in a field of thirty or more other cars. In the SL virtual world, we have spent a few thousand dollars to build complete entertainment and communications venue that includes a race course. IRS branding throughout the venue not only displays our messaging, but it also instantly dispenses marketing collateral and links to our Careers web site.

Wait, there’s an IRS race course in Second Life? Excuse me a moment.

Wheeeeee! The IRS rocks!

The service is currently working with universities and other academic institutions to raise awareness of its Second Life presence.

IRS Saves Millions by Using Second Life to Market Its Employment Opportunities [College Recruiter]

Pure West’s Second Skin looks the lives of gamers and virtual world residents as they live out their lives playing World of Warcraft, Everquest, and of course, Second Life. It touches on the topics of addiction, online romance, and the community feeling and sense of camaraderie that can be fostered by a group of people essentially only connected to each other through the internet.

Since first reading about the project back in 2006, I’ve pretty much lived through most of this documentary, having put my Everquest addiction behind me well before that. Back then I thought it would be interesting to watch in order to see how those people live. Now I’m going to pick it up to see if I spot anyone I know.

Along with the DVD release on August 25th, Second Skin will also see a limited theatrical run, so check your local papers, just in case. Check out a sneak peek at the first five minutes of Second Skin below.

Internet access in many Arab countries often employs filters that prevent access to online games or sites that are considered offensive to Islam or Arab culture. Muxlim’s as yet untitled ‘Second Life style’ MMO aims to provide an environment that is acceptable to such restrictions while still being a fun place to hang out.

According to Muxlim, users will have “the opportunity to wear a hijab, and go to prayer rooms.” Which may not sound like that much fun but, when you have seen the kind of tedious stuff they get up to in actual Second Life, starts to seem fairly reasonable.

Muxlim plans Muslim world’s first virtual world [TechCrunch]

Hewitt, as protagonist Melinda, must enter the world of Virtual Life and send the specter haunting the online game toward the light and away from her hilarious outfit. Based on the preview spot for the episode, after the jump, we expect good times at someone else’s expense.

The show airs tonight on CBS at 8 PM, which for those of us on Eastern time is right now.

IBM and Palace Museum Announce Opening of The Forbidden City Virtual World Celebrating 600 Years of Chinese Culture

“The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time” Recreates Historical Treasure as a Fully Immersive 3D-Internet Experience

BEIJING, Oct 10, 2008 — Today, some 600 years after construction began on the 178-acre site that would become the centre of unrivalled imperial power known as China’s Forbidden City, the Palace Museum and IBM will open the walled fortress — and hundreds of years of history and culture — to the world.

Three years in the making, IBM has meticulously built a virtual recreation of the architecture and artifacts of the former palace grounds, enabling online visitors to get a first-hand view into imperial China as embodied in the intricate design, history and storied culture of this newly accessible Forbidden City.

“The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time” ( www.beyondspaceandtime.org) is a first-of-a-kind, fully immersive, three-dimensional virtual world that recreates a visceral sense of space and time of this Chinese cultural treasure — as it was centuries ago during the height of the Ming and Qing dynasties — for most anyone with access to the Internet.

“The rich cultural heritage of China’s imperial past, embodied in the Forbidden City for over five centuries, is now brought to life and accessible to all through a virtual world created by IBM and the Palace Museum,” said Henry Chow, Chairman, Greater China Group, IBM. “This initiative takes the online experience to a new level of innovation with rich content, educational storytelling, community and social networking features that represent the next generation of 3D-Internet applications.

“What makes me proud is that IBM now has opened the door to a cultural treasure and rich heritage to everyone, everywhere which in the past was only available to relatively few.”

Originally, the Forbidden City was constructed to embody the idea of the emperor as the centre of the universe with a series of dramatic courtyards and gates, buildings and landings underscoring a design built to reinforce security and power. This huge palace complex was completed in 1420, about twelve years after construction began, and contains hundreds of exquisite buildings and historic artifacts, and on October 10th, celebrates its 83rd anniversary as a museum and one of China’s major cultural attractions.

Now, using virtual world technology, visitors can experience the awe inspired by this vast and amazing space. Rather than experiencing its wonders in isolation, the virtual Forbidden City allows you to see and interact with other users and a range of helpful automated characters. As you explore the virtual Forbidden City, you can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, or you can take tours and participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of Qing culture.

Visitors to the virtual Forbidden City will be able to take tours that correspond to major historical topics and stories from the Forbidden City, such as Dragons of the Forbidden City, the Supreme Golden Halls of the Forbidden City, the Imperial Garden, and the Symbolic Animals in the Forbidden City.

“‘The Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time’ is a program that combines China’s world-class cultural heritage with state-of-the-art information technology. Three years in the making, the Palace Museum worked closely with IBM in jointly engineering the program. Both parties have been deeply touched by the profound and dazzling ancient Chinese culture,” said Zheng Xinmiao, the Director-General of The Palace Museum. “Meanwhile, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to IBM for its full investment and devotion and its strategy of applying innovative technology to social and cultural promotion. This program is only a start, which, as we believe, will have an unlimited future to explore China’s traditional culture.”

Visitors to the virtual Forbidden City may also engage in activities in which their avatars take an active role in the culture of the period. For example, avatars can take part in activities such as archery, cricket fighting, and playing the ancient game of Weiqi, the “board game of surrounding” now popularized as GO. Visitors may also view and inspect artifacts and scenes such as “The Emperor Having Dinner” and “Court Painting.”

The recreation of the Forbidden City represents how 3D technology can be used to educate and provide cultural experiences on a large scale. At the Forbidden City in Beijing, local visitors can also use a kiosk to interact with the virtual world. It is the first virtual world to be built using SOA architecture and includes open source components such as Linux.

IBM’s BladeCenters with Linux Blade Servers are at the heart of this virtual world — supporting robustness with the capability to enable thousands of concurrent users and the scalability comparable to that of massive multiplayer online games. IBM built the application using WebSphere Application Server, Tivoli, ESB (Message Broker), DB2 Viper, and IBM BladeCenters. The virtual world runs on Linux, Windows and Mac operating environments.

IBM has dedicated more than a decade to creating successful cultural heritage projects, including the Vatican Library, the Pieta, Hermitage Museum, Eternal Egypt, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

With so many entertainment and consumer brands moving into virtual worlds, it’s easy to overlook the opposite trend starting to emerge.

A handful of successful online brands are starting to move onto store shelves through licensing and partnership agreements.

Neopets is the poster child in this space and Habbo, on the back of some early dabbling in the space, hinted at the show of a major offline brand tie-up to be announced soon

The real-to-virtual transition can be tough (be it a virtual world or movie tie-in), but it seems a lot easier to go the other way — and considering a lot of virtual world denizens are so damn cute already, how hard can a toy line be? Perhaps more traditional companies looking to ‘break out from the glass wall’ of retail can take a few marketing cues from their younger, simpler virtual worlds cousins.

The War on Geekiness and 4 Other Trends from Virtual Worlds Expo 2008 [Free To Play]

A study into the social psychology of virtual environments, by Northwestern University, indicates that people respond to the same social cues about race in virtual worlds as they do in real life.

In an experiment carried out in There.com users were approached by a researcher wearing either a light-skinned or dark-skinned avatar and asked a series of questions..

The study found that when asked a fairly demanding question, followed by a less demanding request (a so-called ‘Door in the face technique‘, dark skinned avatars received a significantly lower rate of positive responses.

Same old, same old.

Researchers find racial bias in virtual worlds [ITNews.com.au]

(image source: http://soulsphincter.blogspot.com/)

Everything. Much of the GUI is not as complete or polished as planned in designs. Room creation/publishing/decorating could be a lot easier than it is now – we’re working on that. Social functionality needs to be built out further – finding friends and inviting friends should be easier and more productive. There are some aspects of the client that limit how flexible it is as an element of web design – we would like to have it be more malleable in the hands of web designers.

There is a big demand for the ability to create content. We have a tool that our artists and partners use to publish content after its been exported from off-the-shelf DCC tools like Max, Maya and SketchUp. The publishing tool needs a redesign and documentation before its ready for public consumption. However, UI design and development for that is a simpler task than ironing out the policies for user-generated content.

Ruberg’s initial complaints centered around Lively’s lack of support for cybersex, but she coyly notes that “Earlier conversations with Young may or may not have involved interface design changes specific to cybersex, but since Google has no official statement on sex in its virtual world, those comments will have to be left to your imaginations …”.

Q&A with Google Lively’s User Experience Designer [Terra Nova]

… We tested whether fantasy gamers conform to the Law of Demand, which states that increasing the price of a good, all else equal, will reduce the quantity demanded. We created two exactly equivalent worlds, and randomly assigned players to one or the other. The only difference in the two worlds was that the price of a single good, a health potion, was twice as high in the experimental world than in the control. We allowed players (N = 43) to enter and play the environment for a month. We found that players in the experimental condition purchased 43.1 percent fewer of the potions, implying a demand elasticity of -0.431. This finding is well within the range one expects for normal economic agents. We take this as evidence that the Law of Demand holds in fantasy environments, which suggests in turn that fantasy gamers may well be economically normal. If so, it may be worthwhile to conduct controlled economic and social experiments in virtual worlds at greater scales of both population (thousands of users) and time (many months).

This is kind of a less cool version of the WoW plague research, still my favourite example of academic research utilising MMOs. As noted by the WoW researchers, virtual worlds may offer the potential to conduct research that would be impossible using real people (like, say, unleashing a plague upon the world).

A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science [via Terra Nova]

A new report has been released on the utility of ’serious games’ and in-game marketing in virtual spaces like Second Life; OTOinsights, the research arm of One to One Interactive, takes a look at the success (or lack thereof) of marketing attempts by major firms. They describe the results as ‘uneven’ and make some suggestions on how companies can better utilise virtual spaces to pitch their product(s):

“Serious games” refers to the use of games and game technologies for non-entertainment purposes. Traditionally, the education, health, and military sectors were the primary actors in this domain, but in the past few years, marketing has arisen as a major sub-domain of this area. Examples range from the selling of advertising inside video games to dozens of small, experimental corporate-sponsored spaces in virtual worlds such as Second Life, to the fully realised first-person shooter America’s Army, developed as a recruitment tool for the U.S. Army. The results have been uneven, as most of these early efforts have had an experimental edge. This report releases findings that compare player engagement in some of Second Life’s most successful user-generated areas compared with some of the more ambitious corporate-sponsored efforts in Second Life.

From Worlds In Motion:

In its study, the firm noted that overall, the top user-generated sites are more popular than the top corporate sites in Second Life. “Perhaps the explanation for this disparity is that corporate sites offer different content or experiences than user-generated sites, and builders of user-generated sites are more effective at offering the content users want. Or perhaps the corporate sites offer similar content, and the reason is that Second Life users are simply resisting corporate influence as a part of their hipster ethos”.

Oh, snap. Starbucks, we don’t want your kind here.

Serious Games for Marketing [One to One Interactive via Worlds In Motion]