I spent the evening in vSide, a virtual world seemingly aimed at teen music lovers. It does seem a bit like a 3D Myspace, except more commercial. Basically, you can wander around these different small city-like places, each one consisting of different venues, shops, and residential spots that play different music channels. You have the ability to rate the music you hear, talk to other people, shop with "creds" you can buy via your credit card, "emote" with various available actions, and check out people's profiles.
The graphics in this virtual world are very cool-looking. The avatars have a cartoon-like quality to them. The landscapes and characters are fast-loading, unlike what you usually find to be the case in Second Life. This, in itself, makes it easier to navigate.
However, at this point, there's not much to see or do. The shops want you to spend real money on clothes, and clothes seems to be the only thing available to buy. Considering how little there seems to do there besides walk around and hear the different channels, I'm not sure why I'd care to spend money on clothes at the moment. I appear to have access to only 3 main city-places, and one of them won't load. The music that I've heard in the other two all sounds pretty much the same to me - a lot of it is current pop, rock, and hip hop. I heard all of 3 songs I like in the space of 2 hours in-world - 2 by Gwen Stefani and one by Coldplay. And there doesn't seem to be a way to find out where the music you're interested in might be playing.
The avatar customization seems very limited, as are the free clothing choices. I can't help but feel that they're expecting to make a killing off selling in-world items like Second Life does, as if what they have at this point is anywhere near what you can find in SL in terms of creativeness and variety. The vSide vendors seem to be selling what you'd find at Old Navy, which isn't much of a fantasy - I'd rather pretend I'm buying clothes for a grand ball if I'm going to spend real money. I mean, I can see spending some Lindens on an ornate imaginative costume but not on simple jeans and t-shirts, particularly if I'm going to be branded by the shop in the process. In fact, one of the more disturbing parts of one's vSide profile is the brands section, where one can identify with as many brands as one's heart desires through the use of tags.
As far as events go, it seems like all the coming attractions are dj parties and a bunch of "talk shows."
vSide does not allow custom-made content, unlike Second Life. So much for the creative impulse.
vSide also depends a lot on web-browsing access. If you want to see someone's profile, you get sent to the web. If you want to make changes to your own, you get sent to the web. This definitely takes away from the seamlessness of the application at this stage.
After reading this article from Metaversed on vSide, I was expecting to be pretty wowed. Granted, the graphics are darn cool. But the world itself seems so limited at this point. I'm just wondering whether the music and graphics is enough to make teens want to use this space for socializing.
