The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
There.com is a very different type of space. This website is advertised as a totally new type of creation. While not a game, There.com is a virtual space where people purchase an account and login to a character they have created just as in other massive multiplayer online games such as The Sims, Everquest, or Asheron's Call. But unlike these games, There.com has no type of competition or currency of any type. There are no missions to go on, no bad guys to kill, or houses to build. This space is advertised as a virtual gathering space. Once you have logged in and retrieved your character, what you do is up to you. You can go surfing over the sand dunes, take a walk, meet others for drinks, go sightseeing, or just find people to chat with. It is the first virtual space that is not a competition or game of any type, it is just a place to get together with others online. And people are taking notice. There.com is trying to entice companies who may have employees scattered across a city, or across the globe to use their space for virtual meetings. Employees could navigate their avatars to an office or a building located on the website, go inside and meet with others from the same company. All decisions could be made right here, and travel costs would fall through the floor. The U.S. military already has signed a contract with There to provide a virtual training space for military personnel. In the first attempt ever of its kind, There employees are designing a model of the entire earth over a period of several years. The entire globe. Every city, town, lake, and river will be modeled in this space. The idea being that the military will then be able to use this model to virtually "drop" personnel into any space on the globe so that they can orient themselves in a space they may be heading to without ever having to leave their home bases. As well, it is hoped that the virtual people modelled on the website will be realistic enough that personnel will be able to train for missions on their computers. As a test of this concept, virtual models of Kuwait City and Baghdad have already been designed and are currently being used by the U.S. military. There also has been rumoured to have been exploring ideas of marketing and shopping in an online space. The first part of this plan involves allowing companies to put up billboards and advertisements in this virtual world. This alone would be a first. Rumour has it that Levis will be one of the first companies to try to entice people to buy real products through advertising in a virtual world. But apparently this is only the first part of the plan. A second move would allow companies to sell goods and clothing in this virtual space that people could use online. An example would be clothing. A large part of the There experience involves people dressing up their avatars however they wish. Seeing this, clothing companies will soon be selling virtual copies of their real products. If your avatar looks good now, wait until they get a pair of virtual Levis jeans. Finally, the last part of this plan would see virtual malls created which people could navigate their avatars through, shopping for all types of products. But in these malls, avatars could shop for virtual products for themselves, or real products for you which would then be mailed. An interesting concept, and an interesting space, which is letting us look at a few of the possibilities the Internet may hold for the future. ([email protected])
