Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual Hills
Companies are flocking to market themselves in game-like and usually three-dimensional online virtual universes, but the long-term shape of this fledgling industry is far from clear.
“We’re pretty much where the internet was in the mid-1990s,” says Steve Prentice, a vice-president at technology research group Gartner, echoing a view held by participants at the Virtual Worlds conference in Manhattan earlier this year.
Joe Laszlo, analyst at JupiterKagan, says the virtual worlds are “like the early days of the Victoria’s Secret webcast”.
“It was crappy, but hot, so everybody went.”
MTV executives cite their television-show spinoffs, Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual Hills, which have attracted 600,000 registered users since they were launched six months ago.