The Metaverse Blogger

Remember that virtual McMansion your mom told you not to buy, because it might turn out that you didn’t have all the money needed to pay for it? Well… we hate to break it to you, but your mom might have been right. On January 7, 2009 the United States Internal Revenue Service moved closer to taxing virtual goods and transactions following the release of national taxpayer advocate and adviser Nina Olson’s 2008 Annual Report to Congress. The primary objective of Olson’s report is to shed light on existing and emerging issues needing to be addressed by the IRS. In this years report, Olson pushes to simplify the tax code, improve the IRS’ handling of tax payers experiencing financial hardship, among other recurring issues. The new player on the table this year though is the necessity, Olson says to “pro-actively address emerging issues such as those arising from virtual worlds.”

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Press Release From Sulake.com

FremantleMedia Enterprises (FME), the brand extension arm of FremantleMedia, and Habbo, the world’s largest virtual world for teens, today announced a partnership that would extend the American Idol® brand to the online virtual community of Habbo. The deal will provide Habbo in-game merchandising and sponsorship rights for the American Idol brand.

Beginning in January, with the kick-off of the eighth season of American Idol, FME and Habbo will introduce an American Idol virtual world within Habbo.com. This partnership will enable the American Idol brand, and potential sponsors, to form an extended interactive relationship with Habbo’s U.S. audience of more than 3 million teens. The partnership is the first for American Idol with a teen virtual world.

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Engage! Expo being held March 10-11, 2009 is to be sponsored by a number of leaders in virtual world technology and metaverse related news. Sponsors listed so far are Active Worlds, Electric Sheep, Habbo, Super Rewards & Virtual Worlds Management. Since some of these sponsors are new to this year’s expo (at least in the sponsorship capacity) I decided it would be nice to include “About Us” information from each of the companies websites. Any sponsor of the expo has the potential to garner a good amount of publicity and media attention - a welcomed opportunity for any company on the list.

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The spectrum of virtual worlds and 3d environments continues to grow larger by the day, as programs like Just Leap In move from closed alpha/beta testing, to public releases that allow the world at large to take a glimpse at what’s being worked on. Just the other day Just Leap In announced their open beta program, giving metaverse veterans and newbies alike the chance to see what’s cookin’. And even while the industry appears to be crowded enough to warrant a bit of elbowing here and there, JLI (Just Leap In) hits the street running with claims that it isn’t “just another virtual world”, regardless of how many times we’ve heard that time. Interestingly enough, JLI unlike the rest of the virtual world, is at least making some curious claims right off the bat. “Just Leap In… aims to broaden the appeal of web-based 3D for a mainstream audience, especially – early on – the kind of audience that uses a lot of social media tools: Facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, YouTube, you name it” said JLI on their official Just Leap In blog and beta announcement.

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The most recent buzz to hit the metaverse lines is the advancements in Papervision Augmented Reality - a technology that allows virtual objects and avatars to be placed almost directly into our own spaces. The keyword in that sentence being “almost”. Augment Reality is the principle of adding virtual objects or entire scenes to a real world scene, through the use of cameras. That’s to say that virtual objects can be added to the image a camera displays to the viewer. Confused? I was at first, too. If you’ve ever seen a movie where a character throws on a pair of glasses that suddenly begins to display “virtual” elements combined with the real world (say information about what the character is looking at), it’s the same concept of Augmented Reality. The image to the left, from HowStuffWorks.com, illustrates what things might look like using this overlay system.

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