There is a very large community of people out there who are looking at various virtual world projects. Many of these people were part of the 2006/2007 (and before) Second Life explosion that I feel a particular affinity too. If it was not for all that I would not be doing what I do now in quite the same way.
So I take a keen interest in any interesting projects in the space. So it is interesting when people ask if Second Life is dead, meaning are virtual worlds dead on the basis that they don’t hear wild and wacky stories about them in the press quite so much as its all Facebook and Twitter.
However, the industry is gathering itself and the movers and shakers, new and old are creating interesting things.
One such project is a new mirror world project. This one is from Jon Brouchard of ArchVirtual He has been around a while and is a name many will recognise from his architectural approach to virtual environments. I noticed on the Kickstarter a project by him called Main Street MMO cities in Realtime 3D and so I backed it.
Mirror worlds, replications of real places, have a specific set of challenges in gathering and recreating the physical world, however it was not that problem space that interested me. It was that this one is to be built in Unity3d and hence has the chance of being a very accessible platform.
With such a keen interest in Kickstarter at the moment it seems wrong to not invest in a virtual world project on a platform I have a lot of time for by someone whose work we know is of great quality?
In many ways Kickstarter is an entrepreneurial busking on the street corner, getting small change for your talents but hoping to get enough to make something bigger happen. The fact this project is actually making street corners has a wonderful symmetry to it.
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