Don’t Believe the Virtual Hype…Yet

Nothing can make a head spin quite like trying to wrap it around the concept of virtual worlds as anything more than something a creepy neighbor used to sit in his mom’s basement and experiment with. But they are coming out of the basement, slowly but surely. They sure seemed to be a viable, real life medium at the Digital Worlds Conference held two weeks ago in New York. And newly created worlds such as the vLES (virtual Lower East Side created by vMTV and Vice magazine) and the CosmoGIRL! virtual prom (a CosmoGIRL! and There.com creation) got so much coverage by the mainstream media, it seems as if everyone is hip to these virtual worlds but you.

Not true. The reality is that while virtual worlds are more developed and have more visitors than ever, everyone is not “doing it”…yet. Over 70% of the users are children (with influential, malleable minds) and the others are using the medium for video games or Second Life, both of which are largely based on fantasy and not what the “new” virtual world creators claim their worlds are really all about. The applications now being developed for virtual worlds for purposes like real world business development are still on the fringe.

At the min Day Summit today, keynote speaker Geoff Ramsey stated that virtual worlds are good for two things: to learn about community activity and to test new marketing concepts, the key words there being LEARN and TEST. Ramsey also suggested that hardcore users of Second Life should “get a real one,” a notion echoed throughout the digital community.

So while advertisers scramble to figure out how they can make their brand presence known and how to turn virtual interest into real ad dollars, most of the rest of the world is still googling “avatar”.