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MYRL featured by the BBC. Twice
This is what happened hanging out at the Virtual Worlds Forum Unconference yesterday at the Hospital Club in London… 
Virtual world avatars on one site
…the portal allows people to place their characters in one place, then receive live feeds from each of the ‘hangout’ locations.
They can also transport themselves from Myrl to the virtual social networking sites where they have avatars.
The social gateway has been on display at the Virtual World Forum in London.
Virtual worlds carve out new path
Networking avatars
[Virtual worlds have] to become far more ubiquitous, more like a toaster than a DVR
Raph Koster, Areae
Jessica Mulligan is the chief operating officer of ImaginVenture, a Swedish business incubator interested in virtual worlds.
She can see how more direct links to the high street would offer new ways to monetise such worlds but she is ambivalent about how much actual gamers want to bring the two together.
“Virtual worlds are about experimenting and doing something different,” she said.
Closer ties with social networking are inevitable though, she thinks.
“They are two separate markets but you can bring things from each. For example it would make perfect sense for games to have links to social networks so people can put up pictures of their avatars alongside their real identities,” she said.
Going one step farther, Myrl has created a social network exclusively for avatars.
The web-based Myrl platform allows users to manage their virtual lives, seeing what is happening in a range of virtual worlds while keeping up to date with what their or friends’ avatars are doing.
“In virtual worlds you can be an alien one day, partying in New York another and laying on a beach the next and we felt that there was a need for a platform that integrated virtual worlds so that you could access these worlds from the web or the mobile as well as from a specific machine,” said founder Francesco D’Orazio.
Anonymity
It appeals particularly to gamers who have created avatars in a variety of worlds.
Some 30% of Myrl’s users have multiple avatars, on average they have three each, but one busy user is managing an impressive 16.
Among the 19 virtual worlds that are so far signed up are Twinity, Second Life, Habbo Hotel and Entropia
The avatars are linked from the virtual world they inhabit to the Myrl website via a badge which transmits data about what they are doing.
But the system cannot, as yet, link real people with their avatars.
However, this is probably going to change sooner or later. Still keeping the avatar identity absolutely at the center of the platform, we’ll probably give at some point the option to associate your real life name to your avatar name so that it pops up in the searches performed on Myrl. I love meeting new people in virtual worlds but I’d also love to find easily my rl friends’ avatars name and meet them inworld. Wouldn’t you?
I disagree with Jessica Mulligan. If SL is any kind of a pointer, I’d say “virtual markets” are crying out for more high-street activity. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that game environments are currently too limited in their capabilities - and/or too unreliable - to carry high-level retail investment.
The factors in favour of VR-RL shopping, in summary, are:
# Those who spend a lot of time ‘plugged-in’ actively prefer online shopping to the ‘high street’ (malls)
# MMORGs attract ‘opinion formers’, the marketing holy grail
# Declines in retail spending do NOT correlate with online spending. Most analysts still classify the two areas separately, which is why online’s impact on physical retail is not immediately obvious.
# VR techniques are feeding back into physical retail a whole lot faster than vice-versa; viz “virtual mirrors” (they show you trying on different outfits, without your having to change clothes), coming soon to a store near you, and “virtual hairstyles”, which have been around for ages.
The market is still too small - however, this is most probably because MMORGs can’t properly support the investments that would afford an explosion. Opinion formers are worth at least 10x more marketing dollars per head, than followers. All it takes is 1 switched-on MMORG plus 1 forward-thinking mass marketer, then I think the whole scenario will change.
In fact, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the first *truly* massive multi-game were entirely underwritten by a commercial company. We’ve already seen moves in that direction. It’s just going to be a question of who gets it right first. IMO.
Cherry