kaneva

I spoke with an interesting group of people over at Intel yesterday about the future of virtual worlds. One of the things we touched on was the concept of simplicity and how it might be the key to eventual mass adoption. I've thought about it even more since speaking, and wanted to follow up with a few thoughts here, and open the conversation to a wider audience.

Virtual worlds are complicated. Prohibitively complicated. The initial learning curve is so great in Second Life for example, that most people don't stay. It's just too hard. Some other worlds are easier. Kaneva for example is pretty simple. You can be walking around and talking to people in 2 or 3 minutes. The trade off is that your avatar is pretty simple also. In fact Kaneva avatars pale in comparison to Second Life ones. This isn't important though. Not in the context of adoption and retention rates it isn't. It could be a major deciding factor in how the non-Second-Life Social Virtual Worlds will shape up next year, and even be the defining characteristic of a worthwhile contender for the virtual worlds throne that Linden Lab's creation occupies now.

A few examples

Put virtual worlds to one side just for a moment and contemplate the following list:

• Flickr tipped photo sharing when they made it simple
• Wordpress and Six Apart tipped blogging when they made it simple
• Google destroyed it's competition when they made Search simple
• The iPod is the MP3 player, other brands are insignificant
• Twitter tipped mobile life logging when it made it simple
• YouTube tipped video sharing when they made it simple

The points themselves are simplistic, but you'll see what I mean I'm sure.

So the question is...

Who will make virtual worlds simple in 2008? How will it be done? What steps do virtual worlds vendors need to take in order to make this whole concept simple?

Let me know what you think...

The Grid Safari group, which travels virtual worlds and other networked virtual environments got the Kaneva grand tour this week, courtesy of the new community director, Corelli. We learn't alot about the upcoming 2D/3D social world and came away thoroughly impressed with what we saw.

Here are a few of the takeaways from that visit:

1. Kaneva is Hot
Not only is Kaneva a lot more interesting than I had imagined, or indeed experienced in my previous brief visits, but the creativity and community building going on inworld is just far more advanced than you may think. Kaneva isn't Second Life, but it doesn't have to be either, it's a whole new world, literally.

2. Over 500,000 Registered Users
Though most of them are not active in the 3D world of course, Kaneva have still managed to rack up 500,000 registered users in the 6mts or so that they've been in beta.

3. Peak Concurrency is Over 500 Users
You can generally find a bunch of people in Kaneva at any time of the day, hanging out at the mall, or in one of the many clubs and hangouts available via the 'go places' menu. At peaks times, Kaneva has a peak concurrency of over 500.

4. 12,000 Communities
Members can create a community on the 2D side of the site, which gives them a standard 'hangout' consisting of a couple of long corridors and an L shaped room with a half moon conference table. Most residents purchase building blocks using their Kaneva credits and cover up the table to form a dance floor, then embed video's in the walls along with their own textures to form a dance club. There is currently a limit of 50 avatars in a hangout.

5. Creativity Thrives Despite Limited Tools
There are no inworld modeling tools, you can't even make objects outside of Kaneva and import them. This hasn't stopped residents creating fantastic spaces inworld, such as the pizza hangout you see in the picture above, and a complete recreation of the I Love Lucy set in black and white though. Content creation tools are in the works, and the idea will be to let members showcase their creations inworld at their own businesses and handle the transaction side of the process on the 2D site.

6. Two Types of Money
Awards and credits are the currency types in Kanava. Awards you get for things like participating in stress tests, credits are purchased with real money and used to buy clothes, building blocks and other simple products. With the addition of the creative features mentioned above, Kaneva hope to build upon the fledgling economy, which constitutes a major part of the business model.

7. You Can't Sit Down!
That's right. Standing room only. The ability to do simple things like sit on a chair are coming, and more complex features such as voice integration or on the horizon, though no time frame is being given. An hour in Kaneva will reveal other missing features, such as the ability to manipulate camera position and zoom, but it seems like development of the platform is moving along at a good clip. In fact, we lost a few of our tour group due to an unexpected 177mb patch needing to be installed before we could meet inworld.

For right now, Kaneva is limited, as I've mentioned above. If you're looking for what may be the next big virtual world though, I'd say it's a serious contender. It's easier than Second Life, but less game like than Entropia Universe for example, and though the client only runs on windows, being .NET based, what I saw impressed me, and has made me want to set up a Metaversed hangout permenantly in this young world. My advice for those interested in virtual environments is to give Kanava a serious look, I think you'll find it worth the minimal effort required to learn the interface.

Gridsafari, the new "meta metaverse" of Virtual Worlds geeks and enthusiasts is to tour Kaneva tomorrow at 12pm PST, 8pm GMT.

Join the Group NOW
If you're not already a member, then you'll need to join the Google Group now to stay abreast of what we're up to, where we're going and to get tech help from the group with software and orientation. We also have yet to finalize meet up points, and those will be announced on the list!

Kaneva

Kaneva says it "is the first to integrate social networking, shared media, and collaborative online communities into a modern-day, immersive 3D Virtual World." I can't say I've experienced it that way, but that's the entire point of this group, to understand the various 3D environments available to us better, and to start off in new worlds amongst friends, rather than starting from scratch each time.

There have been a couple of vapor ware metaverse "gateways" announced in recent months, of which we've since heard nothing. What we're doing here, is using good old email, and existing web tools to create a fun group for exploring and learning. If you'd like to join us, please do, the group welcomes new members and is newbie friendly, as at least right here, we're ALL new...

Kaneva, the 2D/3D social networking virtual world, has integrated YouTube viewing into their 3D spaces. Users can now view YouTube video's together on their virtual televisions within their own spaces and share with their friends in realtime.

“We are redefining how online videos can be consumed and demonstrating our mission to embrace the Internet as a virtual hard drive for our community to tap into,” said Christopher Klaus, founder and chief executive officer for Kaneva. “We don’t want to put our community in a box and force them to live with what we feed them. We want to empower our members to easily bring in and enjoy with friends their favorite media -- including video, photos, and games -- as another way to express their interests and connect with others.”

I've not had a chance to check this out yet. More when I have it.

The virtual world of Kaneva made headlines when it launched, but there hasn't been much news since. At first access was restricted to those who managed to hit a certain quota of friends in a MySpace-like web application, which drove away the first wave of curious surfers. This was followed by the discovery that there isn't much you can do yet in Kaneva and that the client crashed even more frequently than Second Life's. Recently they've had to overhaul their entire system, which meant that the in-world currency isn't even transferable between avatars anymore. This is being further developed, but nobody is sure exactly how.

If you have managed to get through all of this and still want to script some objects in the world of Kaneva, you would have to sign up as an "elite developer". Today, the elite developers received an exciting announcement:

Are you ready for the new Kaneva Game Platform Licensing? We have received a lot of requests for a license for the masses and we have answered the call. You will soon be able to license the Kaneva Game Platform with source for around one hundred bucks (yes i said $100.00 USD). Keep checking back for more details we are working hard to clean up the latest release and deliver a new version this quarter!

The Kaneva Game Platform consists of a client, world-building tools, the server-side code and artificial-intelligence; everything you need to create your very own virtual world or MMORPG. The jury is still out on how good this package is, but at US$ 100 how bad could it possibly be?