Enabling a distributed virtual goods marketplace…

...that everyone can engage in.

As you may have already realised, VastPark is offered as a white label platform providing you with all the tools we have and delivering the power into your hands so you can own your own virtual world and do what you like with it. We're interested in offering developers a solution that is profitable for them to resell and an extremely affordable solution to clients who want to be able to trial Metaverse and Intraverse projects without spending a million dollars upfront. That's what people need today. But right from the start we've been thinking a lot about what sort of platforms will be needed when there are millions of virtual worlds.

Now it would be one thing to offer a way for everyone to have their own virtual worlds platform that they can brand however they want, but our vision goes far beyond that.

VastPark aims at offering a new level of distributed software to the interactive 3D virtual worlds marketplace. You can consider us a generation 2 virtual world system along with others such as Metaplace and Ogoglio. We've been working on this since 2003 and we consider it far more than a virtual world platform. It is in fact supporting a "virtual web".

We see that a massive part of this future is the enabling of interactive 3D widgets that act as both virtual goods and services. We've developed a specification called MetaWSS that we think we should open up for others to use. In fact, we think that open media specifications are the way forward for getting beyond the virtual world silos that we face today. What you are going to see is that with the right specifications the industry can offer a distributed virtual goods marketplace that everyone can engage with and can be implemented by any virtual world platform and offered on any device.

Why is that good? Where's the business model in giving away our technical innovations? We believe that we are essentially in a pre-competitive space. All the platforms currently offer different feature sets and maturity models and there is far more need for virtual worlds than anyone has capacity to supply. That's great for virtual world developers and platforms alike. But we can grow the market far larger and far quicker when we have ways of enabling cross-platform virtual goods. That's great for the industry and great for us. The more virtual worlds there are, the more VastPark's core technologies will stand out.

Currently all virtual goods marketplaces are owned and controlled by the world that uses the goods. I think of this as the "Habbo Hotel" model. While that model works now, it won't scale across the Virtual Web. It doesn't let 3rd party content developers publish content to a range of platforms.

I believe we need to enable a distributed virtual goods marketplace that allows publishers, worlds and marketplaces to share the revenue of advertising and virtual goods sales. This will allow publishers to offer their virtual goods and interactive advertising across more virtual worlds just as occurs across real world markets today.

I'm interested to know if anyone else is thinking about what we can achieve in the near term with a distributed virtual goods marketplace? In a later blog, I'll lay out what I think is central to achieving this.