3D Online Retailing with Metaplace?

.A very large development in virtual worlds recently occurred. September 18th, 2007 was the day the open-platform open-ended new product called Metaplace was publicly unveiled. Metaplace was recently featured as one of the 40 hottest startups in the TechCrunch40 conference.

Metaplace is a web-based program developed by Ralph Koster, who is a very ell know game developer. He recently  formed his own virtual world company. Here is  a link to his blog. Mr. Koster wants to revolutionize and democratize access to virtual worlds for everyone with this product. He says (and demonstrates in the video pasted below) that Metaplace is very versatile and user friendly and can be used for gaming, socializing or e-commerce, can be embedded in a webpage, Facebook profile or blog and because it is web-based it can be embedded into “any” webpage. 

It will easily empower literally anyone without programming or content creation knowledge to create their own virtual room or virtual world that can be connected or added on to other virtual worlds to create a virtual community. There can be millions of user created worlds that can be easily tagged, rated, reviewed, searched, and connected together. See Virtual Worlds Opened to All , by Jonathan Fildes.

Look for yourself on this video of Mr. Koster recently unveiling his Metaplace product.

This has very powerful implications for virtual retail marketing.   

There are predictions out there that up to 80% of active Internet users will be using a virtual world in four years time and something like the Metaplace product has the potential to make virtual worlds as common as using a Web Browser. Just think of the impact this will potentially have on retailers. 

In addition to retailers’ having a Web presence – they will literally be able to create a virtual 3D online store with a product like Metaplace. Users can sign on and enter the store, input body size measurements to temporarily create a customized avatar, then try on all sorts of garments and drop them into a shopping cart! WOW! This will transform shopping at the mall. It will still be a social experience because others will also be there shopping or you can arrange via My Space or FaceBook to meet friends at a certain time and you can shop together. Welcome to the future.

 The ability to form various social communities is a very powerful aspect of virtual worlds – a product like Metaplace has the potential to make the virtual reality experience as common as Web-surfing and as social as MySpace and very exciting (and also profitable) for on-line retailers.

Here are some links to recent videos discussing the future of virtual worlds in general: Virtual Worlds –  Part I: Virtual Reality, and Part VI: The Virtual Future, from  the CNN Future Summit last June.