I don’t usually blog specifically about ESC here, but I’ve had a number of people recently ask what ESC is focussed on these days, and today we’ve made an announcement about one of our initiatives. You can follow ESC news and its thinking on virtual worlds at the aggregate Sheep blogs here.
The Electric Sheep Company has for 3.5 years now been a company dedicated to bringing about the mass adoption of the metaverse through building virtual world applications. We’ve built considerable expertise through building applications for consumer entertainment, marketing, enterprise communication, recruiting, R&D, and other purposes. We’ve learned how to design the right experience for a particular audience through the use of interactive tools available, and keep learning with every project.
Creating new technology has always been a key part of that process. Because virtual world software is generally in its early stages, we often find ourselves extending it to attempt to accomplish what we need to. Second Life in particular is a fantastic platform for experimentation; our very first consulting project was building a search tool for Linden Lab, and in the last 3 years we built quite a bit of software connected to Second Life.
Last year we made a major first attempt at overcoming usability barriers in Second Life by creating our own downloadable viewer and launching it as a part of the CSI:NY in Second Life project. While that viewer was only a first step, it caused us to conclude that without more access to the server side of that platform, we weren’t going to get the feature set to a point where it was complete for any specific mass market virtual world application that we believed could have near term success.
That thinking extends across the virtual world technology landscape, as I’ve written here - considerable amounts of technology have been built over 20 years, some of it great, but from my point of view we remain without the feature sets needed for most applications that are likely to quickly obtain ten million regular users outside of the under 13 year old demographic.
With that in mind, one of the things ESC has been working on is software designed to fulfill some light-weight virtual world applications on the Web. We’ve announced today our WebFlock application; a tool set for embedding flash-based virtual spaces within Web sites and integrating those into any existing Web applications.
This isn’t a consumer virtual world play by ESC; rather we’re adding to the roster of virtual world tools available for anyone creating a consumer experience, and we think this tool will be a great fit for a set of use cases that isn’t currently well served. Primarily we see it as enabling virtual spaces for casual audiences who are already coming to a given Web site. WebFlock allows for taking a community of interest, whether around a movie, TV show, sport, pop culture, etc. or around an activity, like dating, and adding the core value of virtual worlds - synchronous experiences where users feel like they are in a space together. We’ve announced that we’re using WebFlock to create an experience for Showtime’s The L Word, and we have other projects underway as well, from simple promotional spaces to entire new virtual worlds that are based on WebFlock.
ESC is continuing to perform projects on any virtual world platform. We typically are hired in part to help organizations choose what technology stack makes the most sense for them to use. I certainly continue to believe in the power of 3D, for example, that would lead certain use cases toward the downloaded virtual worlds, including the new crop of 3D Web plug-ins.
For many of the potential projects we encounter, though, we are excited to now have what we see as an optimal tool for creating an entirely white labeled (no 3rd party network users have to sign up for), and no download/install/plug-in virtual experience that can be highly customized and woven throughout a Web application. We believe this will quickly help spread virtual spaces around the Web. As we’ve watched and been a part of the latest spurt of growth in virtual worlds, it seems to us that one of the most important ways to move the industry forward is through bringing large audiences into virtual worlds one step at a time, which means no barrier to entry, clear relevance to something they already are engaged in, extremely easy interfaces, and clear value for their time. Those have been the goals driving the WebFlock feature set.
ESC looks forward to not only using WebFlock to create such virtual world applications, but also in making the software available for other companies and studios to use and customize themselves.
Of course if you want to know more about WebFlock or ESC’s services across any virtual world technology, please contact us.