A friend of mine recently forwarded to me a news announcement about a Silicon Valley startup, Multiverse, securing $4.125 million in funding. This isn’t the sort of news item my friends tend to send me (you should see my collection of lolcats), so I was curious about this. Turns out, Multiverse is a company seeking to build what is essentially a virtual world publishing platform, designed to allow emerging game and world developers to create their vision efficiently and inexpensively. And it’s cross-platform, allowing you to access multiple worlds from the single download (like web browsers do). Oh, and it’s free.
From Multiverse’s About page:
Multiverse’s unique technology platform will change the economics of virtual world development by empowering independent game developers to create high-quality, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and non-game virtual worlds for less money and in less time than ever before. Multiverse solves the prohibitive challenges of game creation by providing developers with a comprehensive, pre-coded client-server infrastructure and tools, a wide range of free content–including a complete game for modification–and a built-in market of consumers. The Multiverse Network will give video game players a single program–the Multiverse Client–that lets them play all of the MMOGs and visit all of the non-game virtual worlds built on the Multiverse platform.
For the first time, indie developers will have the opportunity to create the virtual worlds they’ve been dreaming about. And many of these new worlds will attract players who are completely ignored by today’s MMOG publishers.
Cool.
So in my past MetaF’s, I’ve been harping a lot about why the virtual world trend shouldn’t be ignored by museums as a fad. At the risk of sounding incredibly repetitive, imagine having a free and simple-to-use (ok, ok, the platform is still in testing and development, but I’m assuming that it will ultimately become as simple to use as a web page is) tool to create a virtual museum for your offsite visitors, populated with your virtual objects, and curated for content. Or if you want to recreate a period of time, you could certainly do that as well. Plus, you probably wouldn’t have to worry about the griefers and sexual content that currently plague Second Life. Like a web page, the museum’s virtual world would be entirely controlled by the museum.
A lot remains to be seen, like how this platform will actually work and how long it will be before tools are developed to make development of the world that much easier (ok, nightmare scenario – Geocities of the metaverse. EEK!). But I have to say that the reports I’ve been hearing about it make it sound awfully promising that the 2D WWW will become 3D sooner, rather than later.
