What I bookmarked today

Playhut, maker of the Playland EZTwist tents and tunnels and Mystikat toys, launched an interactive toys division, GoLive2, with two virtual worlds back in October. The worlds targeted at kids from 6-13, Wowbotz for boys and Mystikats Kutties for girls, now have toys to go with them. The company will release four Kuttiez and four Wowbotz with matching accessory packs in the spring of 2008. Unlike most other meta-toys that just give kids access to the world, GoLive2 is making users work for them. Each toy comes with its own mini-games that in turn unlock passcodes that give users access to new areas in the virtual worlds. “I founded Playhut with the goal to bring a new way of play to the marketplace,” said Brian Zheng, CEO of Playhut. “With GoLive2 we are offering kids and their parents a very different and unique way of playing, based off the question, ‘How do you play?’ GoLive2 innovates play in a way that has not yet been introduced to the Toy Industry.”

Musion Eyeliner creates amazing High-Definition 3D holograms that appear to float within a live stage setting.

great tutorial of the new PBS play interface

It’ll cost $9.95 a month when it launches officially, or $79.95 for a yearly subscription. PBS is working with libraries and its local TV stations to offer free access to non-broadband users too. It sounds like a big project with plenty of thought behind it, although you could question whether it’s a virtual world in the generally accepted sense of the term – since there’s no interaction between users (something PBS is presenting as a safety feature). That isn’t a criticism of PBS: more food for thought about whether the term ‘virtual world’ includes this kind of application. Thoughts?

While not being updated much anymore, this is an interesting site of historic data on mmogs

Interesting discussion on a topic we ponder all the time in the industry. Virtual Worlds are part of MMOs, but virtual world is used to mean MMO in the mainstream now.

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