Broad cross-section of User backgrounds: Users are attracted to virtual worlds for a variety of reasons, and these differing reasons ensures that Users will be different from each other in some ways. In which ways does Twinity not compare well with other virtual worlds?ġ. This capacity has not yet been added to Twinity, but is expected in the near future, certainly before the product exits the Beta phase. User-created items: This is common to many virtual worlds, to a greater or lesser extent. Proximity to objects and entertainment sources gives Users a shared experience that can form the basis of their interactions.Ĥ. Virtual physical proximity: Users have something immediate to talk about that they can share. Interactions which might never have occurred in the real world are common-place and informal in a virtual world.ģ. Eclectic encounter-based mechanic: Users can bump into other Users and interact with them. Virtual physical presence: unlike text-based solutions, Twinity gives Users visual cues from the people around them, from simply knowing who is in the room to being able to get some measure of personality from appearance.Ģ. How does Twinity overlap other virtual worlds?ġ. The entertainment types are quite limited at this point and it does not look as though that is going to change substantively in the near future.
Convenience: it puts a whole bunch of people together with some digital diversions, in a place where they can interact with other people who have an interest in the same digital material. However, this means that the Users’ options are limited when it comes to interacting with the world (where “User” is Twinity jargon term referring to the real person at the keyboard).Ģ. Lightweight interface: there’s less to learn about interacting with the world than in other virtual worlds. So what would make a potential user pick Twinity over another virtual world, or choose to use it despite the mass of more accessible options available for entertainment purposes?ġ. However, only the flakiness of the system looks set to change, as the feature-set does not seem to be destined to change radically. It doesn’t sound too good so far, but to be fair the whole system is still in Beta. Twinity takes pre-existing concepts, makes a light, fluffy interface to access them, and uses what is currently a slow and buggy system to serve up the result. Like many mashups, the main justification for their existence is convenience: bringing together multiple ideas, and associating them in a useful and time-saving manner.
What’s new here, if anything, and where might Twinity fit in the greater scheme of things? It’s a world of real people meeting other real people, filled with real digital content, all set against a backdrop of digital representations of real places and places that could exist in real life. However, Twinity is no more of a mashup of the real and virtual worlds than any other virtual world. “ Twinity – the virtual world that mashes up the real with the virtual world”, proclaims their website.
0 kommentar(er)
