From ancient to virtual worlds

In a bid to increase business, brands are looking to connect to web communities and community-inspired content. The results can be spectacular

King Tut Virtual enables visitors to examine the mask of Tutankhamun’s mummy online

The notion that your customers are only 10 seconds away from your competitor’s web site still holds true. But while the server and network infrastructure needed to deliver a web site that stays up 99.999 per cent of the time is one aspect of delivering a good online experience, the phrase “content is king” is equally relevant, and just as important for customer retention.

Would a better way to engage customers be by spicing up that dowdy site with some visually stunning graphics, tied into standard e-commerce transaction middleware?

For visually stunning graphics, read virtual worlds, whose genesis can be traced back to the multi-user dungeon program MUD, which originated in 1978 at Essex University. But it was many years before what people now think of as a virtual world was realised –­ a 3D, immersive world, available 24/7 via a web connection.

So the question for businesses is how big is the opportunity to monetise commercial web sites by introducing a virtual world of online activity?

UK firm Rezzable is one company pushing the boundaries of virtual world technology, both technically and in identifying how such a business model could work.

“There is a convergence with content delivery that is creating a new opportunity, and a lot of effort is being focused on making this happen now,” says chief executive Jon Himoff.

Such content delivery will span the web, TV and mobile devices, and Himoff believes the internet is not a destination any more –­ just a place to engage with brands.

“We can see that all the content delivery pieces will come together, but currently it is very fragmented,” he says.

Such fragmentation is something Rezzable is addressing with the launch of its first brand, Heritage Key. This aims to draw together various content delivery mechanisms to see if such a virtual environment boosts visitor numbers.

Himoff describes Heritage Key as “the first solid example of a do-it- yourself immersive, virtual online grid”.

“We’re starting to deliver projects for customers that make the most of this technology and we’re hosting it for them as well,” he says.

The first site Heritage Key has worked on is a virtual museum that allows users to explore King Tutankhamun’s tomb in a digital Valley of the Kings (see http://heritage-key.com), which Rezzable had previously set up in Linden Labs’ Second Life environment.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world running on a compute grid that also offers “tools for business, educators, non-profits, and entrepreneurs to develop a virtual presence,” according to its creators.

Himoff says Rezzable previewed its King Tut Virtual area on Second Life earlier this year, but decided to move to its own grid infrastructure. He says the main reasons for the move were integration and costs.

“Second Life is a closed platform but we use OpenSim [a 3D application server used to create virtual environments] that is open source and free,” he says.

Himoff says this gave Heritage Key a lot of options when configuring the software, hosting it, and integrating it with the Drupal content management system, which is also open source.

“The costs are dramatically lower and we can host more concurrent visitors on our servers,” he says.

Heritage Key is the first of what Himoff calls a content-oriented community, bringing together differing content strands. This includes Flickr, for people to share pictures, and also Facebook and Twitter for people who want to interact with each other, as well as providing information about their own experiences in the virtual world.

However, the community will be focused around a type of content that Himoff admits site owners “will have to interest [users] in,” and which would become the foundation of that community.

“Within this picture, one of the things we find interesting is the migration of user-generated content, which has a lot of issues about copyright infringement,” he says.

“There is also all the management of this user-generated content into a kind of mature version of that, which we think of as community-inspired content.”

Himoff added: “We looked at this in terms of the marketing opportunity, because everyone wants to visit an ancient world site physically, but not just turn up and see a bunch of rocks.”

A common problem for popular ancient world tourist sites in real life is access and sustainability, which a virtual world helps to address ­ – even if it can never entirely replicate the experience of actually being there.

In the case of the actual site of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Himoff points out that currently the tomb is closed, because wall paintings have been attacked by bacteria transported onsite by tourists.

“They are spraying these paintings with penicillin because they have this weird fungus on them,” he says.

“Remember –­ these places were never meant to be opened. They are extremely dry, and so when the tour buses show up and everybody sweats all over the place, the walls act like a sponge, since they have never been exposed to that much moisture.”

Himoff says that in 20 years’ time, the only way people will be able to see the tomb could be through some kind of virtual world.

A further example of Heritage Key’s thinking around community-inspired content is another virtual world it is working on, which will soon go live: Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire.

Himoff says that a virtual site can build on the many theories about what functions the stones performed.

“It fitted with our idea of community-inspired content that needs a catalyst to boost site visitors and interactions between them,” he says.

“Our view is that there are three levels of content. First, traditional commissioned content. Then there is curated content, where you look at the web and pull back information. Finally there is computer-generated data and content, where all the content is put together.”

From ancient to virtual worlds

In a bid to increase business, brands are looking to connect to web communities and community-inspired content. The results can be spectacular

If the virtual world concept works for real-life historic sites, then growing a community adds value and makes the site more interesting, generating a critical mass online.

“We’re seeing that around Stonehenge, where we’ve connected with some of the community members, researchers and writers, as well as people with more extreme views as to what Stonehenge is all about,” says Himoff.

“The upshot is all kinds of information that you would not have had you just gone to Wikipedia, or you just went to Stonehenge and walked around with the audio guide.”

So how do sites such as King Tut Virtual and the Stonehenge virtual world cross over to the harsh world of retail trade, online brands and e-commerce?

Himoff says brands need a more relevant way to connect to communities on the web.

“The nature of cost-effective online advertising is about reach and making it cheap –­ but actually, brands need to find better ways to spend more to participate in the right online communities,” he says.

Brands need to work with quality online communities and take a more active role in supporting new content and media events, says Himoff.

“For example, we have co-creation programmes where we make unique content for brands, which has more relevance for them, and will get those brands above what I call the noise level of today’s standard web sites,” he says.

Heritage Key is aiming to create content-rich, visually stunning, immersive 3D spaces, which offer visitors lots of options for interactivity and engagement, while cross-linking between online and real worlds, and pushing the boundaries of virtual worlds.

How firms are exploring the money-making potential of virtual worlds

As online sales continue to climb, firms looking to differentiate themselves from the competition are increasingly examining virtual worlds.

But there is a distinction to be made between revenue from virtual goods and revenue from physical goods bought through a virtual world.

For the former, investment bank Piper Jaffray predicts global sales of virtual goods to be more than $2.2bn (£1.3bn) this year, rising above $6bn by 2013.

As an example of the latter, PC vendor Lenovo launched its “e-lounge” virtual showroom earlier this year. Based on Nortel’s Project Chainsaw – also known as web.alive – Lenovo’s virtual world is constructed using Epic Games Unreal Tournament application programming interfaces and engine, seen by many experts as better than Second Life’s OpenGL graphics interface.

Users can wander through the lounge, check out Lenovo’s product range and interact with anybody else on the site, although buying a product links back to Lenovo’s conventional web site.

Letting users buy virtual goods is one way of driving revenue, but the new generation of customers exposed to games, social networking and other 3D online environments is likely to be attracted to retail brands that are able to sell physical items through a virtual world.

Inevitably, there are potential drawbacks to running virtual world e-commerce environments as an adjunct to standard web sites. Perhaps the biggest challenge is how to report to real-world administrators about what virtual customers are doing.

Although conventional middleware can be interrogated about standard online transaction behaviour, tracking how virtual customers behave inside a virtual world and mapping that to their purchasing decisions will be a whole new task for marketing executives to tackle.