[p2p-research] virtual berlin, singapore, christchurch

Mon Jun 28 01:01:23 CEST 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gordon Cook <cook at cookreport.com>
Date: Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 12:14 AM
Subject: [Arch-econ] Virtual worlds including twinity from larry podmore

I found this on my hard drive along with a few other files that larry gave
me while  i was in christ church.  Asked his permission to post he said sure

adding that he would appreciate how cities can organise interactions in
cyber space....

 *Virtual Christchurch*
*Making Canterbury Global*
Background to Virtual Worlds
Virtual world technology has existed for many years, and there are many
thriving communities
Children (Club Penguin) – 12,000,000 registered users
World of Warcraft – 9,000,000 registered users
Second Life – 17,000,000 registered users

Background to Virtual Worlds
2008/9 has seen the emergence of a large number of new players into the
virtual worlds space, with both browser-based and mobile interfaces starting
to emerge. It is expected that in the medium term an advanced browser will
provide single access to all of these environments, and that the
environments will allow seamless transitions (this has been demonstrated
already with Second Life and OpenSIM by IBM).

There is still no one proven vCommerce model, but observers such as the
Gartner Group are encouraging businesses to become engaged with virtual
worlds in order to understand the technology and position themselves for the
vCommerce wave. Just like the eCommerce wave – Amazon comes to mind - there
are early market-leader opportunities for those who are able to deploy
successfully in the vCommerce model.

Background to Virtual Worlds
eCommerce has succeeded because it offers a global market for businesses, a
massive consumer base, and highly effective search capability to present
goods to potential buyers.

Shopping malls succeed also, because they offer social networking and
entertainment as part of the shopping experience.
vCommerce has the potential to merge the two concepts into a strongly social
networked experience with the global reach and effective marketing
opportunities offered through the internet.  In addition, it offers the
ability for businesses to interact with customers and partners in a way that
is more personal than audio or video conferencing, and much lower cost than
telepresence.

Why Virtual Christchurch?
The proposal for Virtual Christchurch evolved from some early work on
understanding the drivers behind a range of virtual worlds, and watching how
the activity in the virtual world space has evolved over the last 2 years.

The development of virtual cities in Second Life demonstrated the
feasibility of creating an environment that replicated the real world and
allowed virtual presence at a level of detail that was life-like. In your
avatar form, you can walk down streets, go into shops and apartments, look
at goods on display. However, in part because of its extreme flexibility and
in part because of its user-driven nature, the work on virtual cities has
been largely of academic interest and little real business has come out of
it.
Other platforms picked up the virtual city concept and tried to leverage it.
Exit Reality was one such company with its browser based platform and focus
on rich media search and this has had some success.

Why Virtual Christchurch?
The idea that evolved from monitoring this growth in virtual world
technology was one of providing a virtual city environment in which
businesses could have a virtual presence which simulates their real world
existence. This would then allow them to interact with potential customers
and business partners in the virtual world, offer a more personal customer
support service without the cost overheads of real world staff and
facilities, and allow some low cost early experience with virtual world
technology.
This idea crystalised when one of the virtual world platforms announced that
after evaluating the success of their Virtual Berlin, the Government of
Singapore had signed a contract for Virtual Singapore to be built. Twinity
(a name that comes from merging the words Twin City), a platform deployed by
a German company called Metaversum, had finally managed to achieve a viable
and sustainable virtual city environment.

Why Virtual Christchurch?
The proposal for Virtual Christchurch is based on deploying a pilot virtual
city in Twinity, with some public buildings fully rendered but other
buildings existing as photo-realistic facades. The initial build would
leverage heavily off the work already carried out by ZNO in creating virtual
Christchurch buildings for Google Earth, as these could be imported easily
into Twinity. Metaversum has also offered to provide training and assist
with the creation of the virtual city.
Once this pilot has been built and trialled, it is intended that the virtual
city would be opened up for businesses to have their premises modelled,
integrated into the platform, and staffed in an ongoing fashion based on a
user-pays funding model. This would require a keen focus on helping
businesses understand how this environment could work for them, encouraging
its take-up, and providing an easy entry into the technology.

What are the Benefits?
*Reputation*.  An immediate benefit that would come from the pilot would be
to launch Christchurch as an innovative city in cyberspace, and allow
digital content developers such as ZNO to extend their businesses into
Virtual Reality. This would lead to better growth for those companies.

*Channel to Market for Digital Content Companies*. Metaversum has indicated
it would consider opening an office in Christchurch should the project
proceed to full launch, and this would provide Christchurch current and new
digital content developers with a very strong channel to the global market
as new cities look for development resources.  Again, more growth and a
reason for more digital content companies to set up in Canterbury.

*Business Growth*. Businesses in Virtual Christchurch would extend their
presence globally, while retaining the social contact traditionally limited
to customers and partners in Christchurch. This would allow personal
relationships to be built much more effectively than via current means,
leading to faster business growth.

What are the Benefits?
*Tourism*.  Launching Virtual Christchurch would provide one more way in
which to encourage tourism, through having potential visitors able to get an
initial taste of what their visit would be like, and to be able to make
visit arrangements easily through personal contact via the virtual
environment. Essentially, this would provide one more channel for tourism
market growth.
*New Industry*.  The longer term benefits would be development of a range of
new industries to support the both the local and global development of
virtual environments and vCommerce solutions. Being an early adopter would
provide the opportunity for Canterbury businesses to become significant
players in the emerging vCommerce space.

Twinity
Twinity is already supporting Virtual Berlin, and Virtual Singapore is about
to launch.  Other cities currently being developed are Virtual London,
Virtual Barcelona and Virtual Wuhan.  Twinity has established itself as the
most effective environment for developing virtual cities.

Twinity was voted one of the fastest growing businesses in Europe, and has
just received €4.5M funding to continue its development.
One of the major developments for Singapore is the capability to use
crowd-sourced data from mobile phone geo-tagging to enhance the

Twinity
Twinity is already supporting Virtual Berlin, and Virtual Singapore is about
to launch in August.  Other cities currently being developed are Virtual
London, Virtual Barcelona and Virtual Wuhan.  Twinity has established itself
as the most effective environment for developing virtual cities.

Twinity was voted one of the fastest growing businesses in Europe, and has
just received €4.5M funding to continue its development, bring its overall
investment funding to well over NZD10M.

One of the major developments for Singapore is the capability to use
crowd-sourced data from mobile phone geo-tagging to enhance the Twinity
environment, allowing a rich set of descriptive data to be tagged to a
building. This supports the development of geo-Commerce

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