If you are a regular reader of my blog, from time to time I look at other 3D Virtual Worlds to see where we are in building a 3D Internet. The most recent entry in this club is Twinity, made by Metaversum a company out of Germany.

The game is in closed beta, and as is the case in closed beta games it is not ready for prime time. Lets just say they have some scalability issues to work out, but that has been the case with every beta I have tried.

Here’s the good news: This program shows the most promise of any beta in this genre that I have played since There.com. You can do stuff in this game that you cant do in any other. It already beats Kaneva.com in every comparable category.

Among the stuff you can do that you cant in any other is HTML on a prim. Second Life has it on a limited basis, but in Twinity it seems fully supported. Instantly create a wall picture object and add an HTML and that page comes up on the wall. I was even able to click and play a You Tube video from a wall picture, something Second Life still cant do.

Remember Ariane’s first law of 3D Virtual World success: If you want to succeed you must have two things: User created content and user customizable housing. Twinity currently only has the latter, but it is obviously designed to support the former. User created content is definitely in the plans even though it is currently not available.

Let me prove that user created content is coming. Here is another function of Twinity not found in any other 3d Virtual world: Customizable faces from photographs!!

I decided to test out this feature by using my Poser model face, results from actual photos will likely not be as nice, and may require a few tries to get right. It actually took me a couple of tries from ideal rendered images.

When you load your front and side images from your hard drive, the images are stored in your game inventory and can be used for other uses. Because this inventory space exists tells me it will be available for more than just the custom face tool. Eventually you will be able to upload custom textures for objects. The menu system for objects in world hints at eventual custom scripting.

By the way, the process took a lot longer than 15 minutes, but it did result in an accurate custom face:

It also seems to have color matched the skin tone as well. I am very impressed.

The main Twinity page is not very informative. Here are some more Twinity screenshots.

Here is another review of Twinity from another SL player I found helpful.

Metaverse News reviews, Twinity, virtual worlds