Great Press for AWLD regarding the Thirteenth Floor Premiere
Who says silicon actresses only happen in real life? On May 24, Columbia Pictures' sci-fi thriller "The 13th Floor" will trade a traditional Hollywood premiere for the world's first cyberspace debut.
At 9 p.m. EDT, stars Gretchen Mol and Vincent D'Onofrio--actually, their virtual counterparts as avatars--will walk down the red carpet in a virtual world called "The Thirteenth Floor" (www.thethirteenthfloor.com), in keeping with the film's virtual reality plot.
Fellow cybercelebs Martin Lawrence, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt will join them. Reporter-avatars will conduct live interviews with the guests, including yours truly. Grandstands of screaming cyberfans will line the carpet.
The gimmick sprang from the film's producer, Centroplis Entertainment, also credited with "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." Virtual worlds have been around since 1995, and Centropolis turned to Activeworlds.com Inc., creator of the largest of them.
"Three-dimensional worlds are the next generation of the Internet, as opposed to clicking through pages," says Rick Noll, the 34-year-old founder of the Newbury Port, Mass., firm. "Ever since 'Star Trek' did it in a Holodek, people have wanted to step into their computer."
Virtual worlds have their own rules, police forces, politicians, real estate and citizenship requirements. Activeworlds boasts some 400 virtual 3-D worlds, ranging from a winter wonderland, a Martian landscape and an old English village. Activeworld's worlds are stamped like films with G, PG, R and X ratings and draw an average of 40,000 unique users per day.
Its largest virtual world is AlphaWorld, a modern community the size of California with urban areas surrounded by green fields and mountains, that also operates as a portal to other worlds. It has its own newspaper, art galleries, a university where you can attend lectures and a mall offering e-commerce. Noll began building virtual 3-D models in 1995 for architectural firms and the National Park Service with Activeworlds software. Two years later, he renamed his company, took on partner J.P. McCormick, 38, and built Activeworld's staff from three to 12 people. The company went public on January 22 (AWLD: +1/8, 6) and is ramping up for a secondary offering to take place this year with employee stock options. While its earnings are not yet available, the company makes its money from memberships, software sales and advertising on virtual blimps and billboards within virtual worlds.
Tourists can visit for free, but are only allowed to build temporary structures. More than 18,000 users have become citizens for an annual $20 fee, which buys them the software needed to build permanent sites. Some die-hard settlers spend $70 for software and annual dues of $23 to build their own worlds. Requirements include a computer with 16MB of RAM and a 50MB hard drive; a Pentium processor and Windows 95 or higher for PC users; and Virtual PC software for Mac mavens. Software for the "The 13th Floor" premiere must be downloaded from the Web site in advance.
Beyond entertainment, "Virtual worlds offer a visual space and more powerful means of communication between communities and groups," says Bruce Damer, author of "Avatars" (Peach Pit Press, 1997) and president and CEO of DigitalSpace Corp., a Santa Cruz, Calif., company that builds virtual worlds. "It's also a way for anthropologists to study social models." For those interested in the latter function, he recommends the Contact Consortium, a Scotts Valley, Calif., nonprofit research group.
Like real life, not all is rosy in cybersociety. Sure, you get your mansion and swimming pool, but you also get cybergangs. One vandalized an idyllic Midwestern town called Sherwood Forest, while another, The Click, wreaked more creative havoc by programming a drifting teleporter to throw unsuspecting visitors thousands of meters in any direction.
Not to mention the Virtual Creators: Noll and McCormick. On one particularly slow day, they flooded Alpha World for a few hours as a joke.
"We've gone from people who were establishing a technology and designing a world, to people with almost a Godlike power over this particular universe," Noll told BBC Radio earlier this year. "We've become both a corporation and a government. We cannot treat the community like a regular corporate product, because community members don't like that. But you cannot have harmony in a society without some sort of government system. Otherwise you have anarchy and chaos |
