With the popularity of IMVU now matching Second Life levels, I decided to check IMVU out again after a 4 year absence.

I signed up after IMVU went open beta, and was the 814th person to do so. In those days IMVU was Instant Messenger Viewer Utility. It was a tool that you add to any IM program of your choice, so to use IMVU you had to be using AIM or YIM, and the person you were chatting with must be as well.  Finding people to chat with was difficult. Eventually, they got smart and just started their own IM service for IMVU users to use.

Even after creating their own IM service, I found it annoyng that you could only form a chat with one person, and then add people to the chat.  I prefer to chat wih groups rather than random strangers.

I returned back about a year later to discover they were experimenting with a group chat feature. I liked this, but it was a bit flaky at first. It wasn’t long before I lost interest again, and I pretty much did not have it even installed on my computer for 4 years.

So, after reading the press release about IMVU making money,  having 6 million unique monthly visitors, and traffic equal to Second Life, I had to go check it out again after a long absence.

A lot has changed, so much that I feel like a noobie again.  The biggest change happened in July 2009 when they completely revamped the client program.  In the early days you had to keep 3 windows open to use IMVU: the IM program, the client, and the website.  When they added their own IM service it was reduced to two.  As of July 2009, you only need one.  Shopping, friend finder, group finder, and profiles are all now accessible in the client itself, even through tabs.  It is all organized really well, and Second Life could learn a thing or two, (or three, or four…) from the client.

IMVU now has in my estimation the best 3D client program of any 3D Virtual World I have seen.  Its unfortunate that the bar for this achievement has been set so low.

Since the last time I started IMVU, they have changed the default avatars.  The oversized heads are gone, feet are smaller, and they look more proportional to human normal.  Hands are still big though.

The bad news is that my account still has the old avatar with the big head.  Some would just roll a new avatar with better looks, but in the last 4 years I have collected over half a million game credits through various promotions. Plenty to fix my avatar’s flaws. Its also too cool to have a 3 digit ID number when most have 8 digits.

I have been visiting random rooms, trying to reestablish myself.  I like the rooms with 6 to 8 other people.  I don’t know very many other players so I just dive in and see what people are discussing.  It is mostly just fun blather — the same stuff I find a lot in SL or There.  Part of that is due to the max 10 person limit in all rooms.  The small limit also  forces you to circulate, don’t feel obligated to stay in one place, and don’t get offended if you get booted from a room due to overcrowding.  There are all the usual rooms: roleplay, night clubs, sex play, etc.  Finding stuff you are interested in is not too difficult. Finding people you actually want to hang with is a little more challenging.

I got an “adult pass” years ago, allowing me into all but the VIP rooms.  Rules on the use of adult pass (known as AP) has changed a few times.  For a while there, the only difference between AP and not is the ability to see and say dirty words.  Today nudity is allowed in AP rooms, though it is not as prevalent as one might imagine. People like to dress up a lot. AP is a good way to avoid the “teens” and troublemakers on freebie accounts.

Among the things you can purchase in IMVU is music that you can play in world.  Its about 65 cents a song, but you have to be in a room with someone else to play the music — RIAA rules.  Most of the music comes from emusic.com, so lots of indies, not a lot of mainstream hits. There is some good stuff in there though.

So far I am enjoying the visit, but I have no plans to become one of the IMVU addicts.  My favorite activity in 3DVW’s is to explore, and the format of IMVU is largely anti-explore.  The 10 person per room limit restricts the kinds of events you can have.

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Recently two of the big 3D Virtual Worlds released some numbers of how they are doing, and I thought it might be fun to compare.

IMVU

Population: 40 million registered users
Active: 6 million average monthly uniques
Money Spent (Annual Run Rate) : $25 million
Activity: Users average 1 hour + per day on the site
Peak Traffic: 80,000 simultaneous users online
Other Stats: 770,000 chat sessions per day, and 175,000 virtual items are sold daily
Source

Second Life

Population: Over 20 million registered accounts
Active: Over 1 million unique logins a month,  over 750,000 average monthly repeat logins (logged in at least twice in a month)
Money Spent (Annual Run Rate) : over $500 million
Activity: Users average 1.3 hours + per day on the site
Peak Traffic: Peak Concurrent Users hit 88,065 in April 09
Other Stats: Over 1 million monetary transactions per day
Source and Source

These are very interesting statistics. While I realize that the nature of these two 3DVWs is very different, making meaningful comparisons difficult, they both can claim #1.

IMVU is easily the highest populated, thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign. But, the Second Life economy is about 20 times bigger. Oddly the activity and peak traffic statistics are very similar, so there is no clear winner based on popularity.

Then there are many that question whether or not IMVU is even a virtual world or not. By my broad definition it is, but others consider it a 3D chat program and social network rather than a Virtual World.  Since you can create your own avatar, build your own home, customize both as you see fit, and visit any room you want, its a virtual world in my book. The only significant difference between IMVU and the more narrow definition of virtual world is navigation.  You cannot walk around in rooms, you click on little yellow dots which animate your avatar to a location in the room. You also cannot navigate from room to room.You select an active chat, or create a new one, and you move to a room. Due to the lack of navigation, there is no real estate or vehicles, which explains why its economy is smaller than other virtual worlds.

Some of the statistics are questionable, or at least not directly comparable. IMVU’s active user count seems to be based on sign ins to their website, which is a social network site as well as a portal to the 3D chat, while Second Life’s is purely client logins. The IMVU client allows you to sign in and then wait for a friend to invite you to chat like other IM programs do. That would also skew the “activity” stat above.

Similarly, Second Life’s Activity stat is over inflated due to bots. “Bot” programs keep an avatar logged in daily for long hours, they are used to automate club invites or to model clothing in stores. While bots are a small number of the active user count, they over inflate the time spent in world. According to SL’s own charts 3% of the avatars log in for more than 300 hours a month. That 3% represents 34% of the “activity” in SL.

So are these the two biggest? Well most 3DVW services are a bit stingy with their statistics. About the only thing we have to compare is total accounts (Population), which as you can see above is misleading. No matter how you measure, “active” accounts is always significantly lower than total accounts.

Here are the next five 3DVW’s based on population stats (via kzero.co.uk and other press releases):

PS3 Home 7 million
Free Realms 5 million
Red Light Center 3 million
There 2.5 million
Kaneva 2 million

All others are under 1 million.  Of these five, I suspect There has the most robust economy (possibly bigger than IMVU), but Free Realms is the fastest growing (a million new sign ups a month), and likely the most active these days.

Regardless, it is clear by population alone that IMVU and Second Life’s position as #1 and #2 (or #2 and #1 depending on what stats you use) are safely uncontested at this time.

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So lately I have been having fun with Windlight, and focusing on how real Second Life is looking lately, but have not bothered to ask, “Is this a good thing?”

Above is a montage of screenshots from some of the most popular online communities on the web. World of Warcraft = 10 million subscribers, IMVU = 20 million accounts, HabboHotel = 90 Million accounts, 8 million monthly active users, WeeWorld = 21 million accounts, Runescape = 5 million monthly active users, Club Penguin = 17 Million Accounts, 4 million monthly active users (sources GigaOM, KZero).

What do they all have in common? None are designed to look “real”. They all purposely have a cartoon look to them. According to a recent NWN blog, this is a significant fact:

There’s little evidence of mass demand for an intensely immersive 3D virtual world; instead, indications suggest the market shrinks in inverse proportion to increasing immersiveness.

There’s several worthwhile observations you can make. First, none of them feature next gen, top-of-the-line 3D graphics. (WoW is 3D, but developed with graphics that run fairly well on older computers; also, the visuals are not realistic.) Besides Warcraft, however, none of these top MMOs are 3D at all; rather, they’re 2.5D. And while one hopes that 2.5D-based MMOs will whet the market’s interest in a more immersive, graphically rich virtual world, the exact opposite seems to be the case. (The still-popular Habbo Hotel was launched in 2000, and the cartoonish graphics are basically the same.)

Only after you drop down several million users do you start to see MMOs and virtual worlds incorporating next gen graphics that require high-end 3D cards for optimal viewing– Lord of the Rings Online at about one million subscribers, Age of Conan at about 750,000 subscribers… and Second Life at some 550,000 monthly active users.

Why is this happening? Here we enter the realm of speculation, but it seems that most people experience sensory overload with too much immersion; instead of being drawn into the intensity of the simulation, they’re repelled by it.

Before going into some of my objections to this idea, let me point out some other evidence to support it. Take for example the world of 3D animated films which I have written about. The most realistic looking 3D animated films have been Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express, Advent Children, and Beowulf. Not one of these have managed any real success at the box office, at least compared to the more cartoonish fare such as The Incredibles, the Shrek films, or Ratatouille. The more realistic films have an unfortunate creepiness to them that makes them seem weird and turns people off.

There is a theory in robotics about this effect called “The Uncanny Valley“. From Wikipedia:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.

Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

One then has to wonder if it is possible for there to be a natural detraction to video games whose graphics are too real looking, and is this why Second Life may never reach Habbo Hotel like numbers?

I believe it is possible for games to become too real, but I am definitely not convinced Second Life comes close to that mark. I am also not convinced it is the reason it is less popular than the above named games.

Maybe some Playstation 3 games are getting too real looking. Maybe that is why the Wii is more popular? No, lets face it the real reason Wii is more popular is the innovative controllers.

World of Warcraft is cartoonish compared to more realistic Guild Wars, but it is more popular due to better marketing, the Blizzard name, and WoW has more immersive gameplay. There is more cartoonish compared to Second Life, and yet Second Life is the bigger of the two, for similar reasons.

The most popular online games are not popular because they are less realistic, they are popular because they have been around longer, or are marketed to kids (a huge market for the 2D worlds), or they are free or very inexpensive to play.

Take a look at the best selling stuff in There, IMVU, and SL: the more realistic stuff consistently sells better, because it looks better. QED

The ultimate point is this: Realism is not an important goal in a sucessful virtual world, or any computer game for that matter. Players appreciate realism up to a point, but if the realism comes at the expense of some players with older or less powerful computers, its not worth it.

Metaverse News 3D animated films, clubpenguin, guildwars, habbohotel, IMVU, philosophy, realism, secondlife, There, uncanny valley, virtual worlds, worldofwarcraft

Everybody needs a break now and then.

I mentioned a few posts before that the metaverse is becoming for many people the new “third place” where you can relax and unwind from home and work. Like the real world, it seems that bars and clubs are often the most popular venues.

So I decided to stop by a few of the virtual bars and clubs and just hang.

The virtual club experience consists of going to an area of the 3D world decorated like a club. You dress up your avatar, do sexy dance animation moves that are physically impossible in the real world, and everybody listens to the same streaming audio. This usually spurs conversation. The drinks are free but virtual.

Virtual clubs first started in Active Worlds. My first experiences were in The Sims Online where streaming audio didn’t exist so you had to open winamp and go to a URL that the DJ provided. They have become a requirement for any social game. Even the newest, Virtual Laguna Beach, has four of them.

Above is a bar scene in IMVU. Because there are no physical locations or events in IMVU it is tough to fill a bar with people. I’m hoping this changes once they get the bugs in chat cast ironed out.

Basically, The Lounge, consists of one big club. This game still has yet to really find any kind of an audience. Their last update though improved some animations and graphics. The fact that most all the avatars look like young teenagers tells you right away where the target audience is. Probably not my scene.

Red Light Center is a more mature audience, and for me anyways, the ONLY place worth visiting is Club Blu (sorry, I’m not into the porn theaters or sex palace scene). There is usually a small group of players here hanging out and dancing. It’s usually a friendly atmosphere, but the ratio of men to women is very lopsided right now.

I dont play City of Heroes much these days, but here is a file photo of a party on Pocket D. If you want to know what is going on these days here, just imagine the above picture without the people. Sometimes you can find stuff going on in Pocket Zero (the only neutral place where City of Heroes meets City of Villains), but the biggest party atmosphere location in City of Heroes is probably right outside Atlas Hall.

Almost every MMORPG has its places to hang out, and it is usually where the newbies hang out, or in front of some big quest starting place where people try and get on a good team. Every single one of them have dance animations that people like to play when they are just hanging around waiting on the rest of the team.

Back at my old stomping grounds There.com. It has a lot of great club settings: The Inferno, Club Bali, Oro Lounge, The Cannery, Aero Lounge, etc. They are unfortunately rarely used. Best bet here is to go and see when and where events are scheduled. House parties are still a regular activity in There.

Welcome to Bad Girls, the most popular club in Second Life. Always a big crowd, and always a live DJ, 24 hours a day every day. Second life has many popular clubs, and the best ones are the ones on private sims: Bad Girls, The Edge, Hot Licks, Studio 54, Club Vixens. The atmosphere in each is different, and when the crowds get big, they get very laggy.

I guess like real life, sometimes the bar scene is great, sometimes it is just boring and sad. It all depends on your attitude and friends you tag along with.

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Meez.com is the latest avatar generator site, but unlike this one, or this one, this one allows you to create one in 3D

Once you pick out your clothes, background, and animation, you can save then export the finished picture to an animated gif like above or a jpg for forum or social network use.

It also has its own social network, but kinda lame, heres my uneventful profile there: http://www.meez.com/arianeb

Currently in beta and damn buggy (it says i’m logged in but cant access my closet). Its good for a laugh, but IMVU does the same thing, only better.

Metaverse News 3D Web, IMVU, meez

Basically the story of IMVU starts with There.

Will Harvey is the creator of both. He spent years building There, then left the company soon after they officially launched. According to Harvey, the vision of There was to become the “Metaverse”, but he realized that the internet itself is the Metaverse and that trying to be everyting for everybody is a bit too hard to achieve.

So he took the two most popular activities from There , shopping and chatting, and created IMVU, which pretty much does just those two things.

Originally IMVU was designed as an add on to other chat clients like AOL, but after much discussion, they found that most people prefer a seperate client. The full story of IMVU is told in Will Harvey’s own words at http://www.metaversesessions.com/ (look for the June 1 entry)

There is no walking around in IMVU. You join a chat and find a place to sit, then start typing. The program is free to download, but EVERYTHING costs money.

Want to get rid of that “Guest_” in front of your name? $7.95 Want access to adult content (or chat in the nude)? $19.95 Want the ability to try stuff on before you buy it? $19.95 Then there is the “Gold Pass” which apparently does nothing but costs $9.93.

Custom content is available and even encouraged. Many of the designers from There also design for IMVU. From a monetary stand point, most custom items sell for about $0.25 to $0.50 instead of the big bucks often spent in There.

This is the third program I have written about in as many days. From a “what can it do?” stand point it is the weakest of the three, and yet it is easily the most successful of the three because of custom content.

Apart from the chat client, there is also a MySpace™ like website with profile pages and an active forum. Its not just the program it is a community.

http://www.imvu.com/

My IMVU Homepage (I’ve been a member for two years, but have not done much with it)

Virtual Society IMVU, reviews, virtual worlds