At the recent GameON Finance event I met Karen Lee Hall of Heroic Interactive. We had a brief but interesting discussion of the work both our companies were engaged in regarding kids and virtual worlds. Karen Lee's company is working in 2D FLASH while BlackCherry's direction is in the area of 3D immersive experiences.
GameON was a great event, if somewhat lacking in investor interest. One thing that did surprise me about the IO event was the general lack of discussion surrounding virtual worlds. Karen Lee tried to fill that gap with a question to one of the discussion panels titled ‘The Future is Now.' Her question was something along the lines of ‘Do you see a future where users will be able to transmit their avatars between different virtual worlds?' After some vague references to OpenID, the question was glossed over by the panel (all respected and active game industry professionals) as somewhat naive and unrealistic. This viewpoint seemed to underline again the general lack of familiarity or interest in current activities and thinking in the virtual world space.
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