Virtual Worlds Archive

At the end of 2007 pizza company Papa John’s announced the ability to order a pizza via a mobile device. Today they are announcing a new game which they call an “augmented reality game feature”. The game is part of what looks like a bigger online campaign called Papa John’s Road Trip.

You take your pizza box, turn it upside down, cut out the Camaro car picture, hold it up to your webcam and then play the game using the car picture. You drive around the U.S. and they sprinkle pizza ads in the game.

Seems like a lot of work especially because you may have a piece of the pizza left and won’t want to cut open the box to get to the special decoder image. You can also printout a game piece from the website.

I like the concept but think it would be more usable if they stuck the game piece to the box rather than having to cutup some cardboard and carry around a greasy, pepper smelling box. In the video below, the woman actually seems to carry the entire pizza box upside down to her office – HA! The other questions for the agency who got the check to create this game are:

• does a person who just finished a pizza want offers for more pizza?
• to keep playing day after day as they suggest in the video, you would need to keep the pizza box around – that can’t be a good thing

It’s all about intent with promotions and since the transaction has already completed, I’d rather see PJ push to an email signup and keep the game clean. Or at a minimum they should know if the person has played the game for the first time provide no offers and on multiple return trips, then provide offers. They should also be able to tell whether a person is playing via the computer printout or the pizza box.

Here’s a video of how the game works…

There’s cool and then there’s cool. And then there are the virtual tours that Pixelcase has put together. Pixelcase says they are a “virtual tour specialist” and they have put together a variety of tours to showcase their technology. There are tours of Freemantle Prison,

When I met with Robert Scoble last week, we talked about the future of the Web and how businesses should interact online. While we didn’t discuss virtual tours, here’s a tour of a spa which certainly makes me wish I was in the jetted tub.

I can’t embed the NYC virtual tours but here are a few links to check them out (they need to add deep linking):

• Central Park / 6th Avenue
• Downtown/Brooklyn Bridge / Times Square / Empire State Building

I am not an expert in virtual worlds but on the news tonight there was a segment on Second Life which I thought was worth sharing. The NBC news anchor starts by saying, "The Dark Side of the Web…is Second Life". The segment discusses how parents should keep their teenagers away from Second Life because of all of the sex, porn, drugs, and suicide that occurs in the virtual world. I don’t know about you, but growing up in Brooklyn, most of those things happened on a near-daily basis. The doctor in the segment explains that if teenagers participate in an activity online, they are more likely to want to do it in real life.

Again, while I don’t use Second Life, my guess is that you can find these things anywhere online even outside this "dark side" virtual world.

(apologies for the poor video quality)

MTV, Nickelodeon and Family World have announced plans to build a variety of virtual worlds over the next year. The initial worlds will include SpongeBob SquarePants along with new worlds MonkeyWorld and World of Neopia. The company noted that the new worlds will be developed out of Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group’s Virtual World Studios with the goal of launching new worlds each year.

The World of Neopia will build on the Neopets brand and game. The Neopets brand will also launch an Adobe AIR desktop application called PetPetPet Habitats.

The Nickelodeon brand currently has more than 5,000 games in their portfolio and comScore reports more than 20 million monthly game players.