Electric Sheep Company and "CSI"

Last Thursday, I was able to attend some of the sessions at the Virtual World Summit 2007,
the largest virtual world event in Tokyo.

I would like to introduce some of the sessions I thought was interesting.

The session by Mr. Sibley Verbeck,
the CEO of Electric Sheep Company was very interesting.



Photo CC-BY-NC-SA Fumi Yamazaki

He talked about an interesting example of a TV program called "CSI"
which basically is a mystery, each episode someone is murdered and
detectives will be investigating.

For this program, they are doing something very experimental (and interesting!)
in that they are inviting the audience of the program to join this program in Second Life,
and help to catch the suspect within the virtual world.

The first week, the suspect is not catched, so the audience will be able to enjoy
the virtual world seeking who the criminal is.
They will have new crime every 3 week, and the program will continue for 3 months.

Here you can see the official trailer that CBS uploaded on YouTube:



As the background of this program, we should point out the fact that however you create stuff in virtual world,
people won't come just by that. You need to advertise your virtual space you created.

This experiment with TV program is an excellent way of advertising CSI (or CBS's) virtual space.

Another interesting thing about this project is how they used product placement.
CSI has an image of state of the art, high tech laboratory, and if you have seen the trailer above,
you have seen Cisco's logo there. Cisco is actually paying to get their ad up there.

The ad was sold jointly by CBS and ESC, ESC people actually trained the CBS sales people
and the presentation was done by ESC.
CBS created a sales package of TV ad, virtual world ad, ads within TV episode, etc.

ESC created a special load balancing software for this CSI program,
because normally in SecondLife world you can't get many people in a sim,
so they created over 400 regions in SL, and can accomodate over 15,000 people simultaneously.
If someone wants to go to a copy that your friend is in, that is possible as well.

The story on this program is featured in New York Times:
Fictional Characters Get Virtual Lives, Too


==About Electric Sheep Company==

Electric Sheep Company is a company that develops softwares as well as
contents for the virtual world, especially Second Life.
In order to deal with the virtual world, you need to deal with
media, technology, community, contents and many other aspects,
and ESC is right on top of them.

They have developed OnRez viewer for SecondLife which will be launched on 10/24.
It's a viewer for SecondLife, very similar to browsers.
For web users who has never experienced the virtual world, the usability of SL had been difficult.
OnRez viewer is seeking to solve this problem,
if you put the location in the textbox, you'll get to the place (just like URL)
and you have all the browser navigations such as "back", "home", "history",
you can see websites within this browser, and you can search on your inventory
(which generally gets really messy...)

This OnRez viewer is an essential part of the CSI program.

This is their announcement on the OnRez viewer:

CBS Corp. is the investor of ESC, they participated in a $7 million round of financing,
which includes existing investors Gladwyne Partners.

ESC's clients include Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, General Electric's NBC, Reuters Group and Viacom Inc.

Following are other topics that were covered in Sibley's speech.

==What are virtual worlds?==

What is unique about the virtual world is that you can "feel" the same place,
"experience" the same thing in the virtual world.

It is important to understand this before you create things,
and let the users "feel" and "experience".
If your users are merely "watching" things,
you can have them go to your website or show a video on YouTube.
If you are building something in virtual world, you should make the most of that opportunity.

==What will virtual worlds be used for?==

1) a communication medium. (more human than websites)
2) a great e-commerce platform
    (have someone help out the users for customer service. you can't do that on websites)
3) entertainment, games
4) business, education, training

==What are the business models?==

subscription, selling virtual goods, selling real goods, services are all possible,
but what has the most opportunity is advertisements.
Ads in virtual world are not necessarily ads, they can be contents.

==What are Ad models in the virtual world like?==

1. entertainment brings together large number of people
2. advertiser (and their brands) creates a part entertainment experience
3. get users to advertise for you


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先週の木曜日、両国で開催されたバーチャルワールドサミットに参加してきました。

その中で、「Second Lifeにおける新しいブラウザ技術とマーケティングツール」というタイトルで行われた
Electric Sheep CompanyのCEO、Sibley Verbeck氏の講演が面白かったので少しご紹介します。

CBSがやっている"CSI"というミステリーテレビ番組で、
毎回殺人が起きて科学捜査官が捜査するというもの。

これをESCが協力して、セカンドライフとの組み合わせで制作することになった。

３週セットの番組になっており、最初の週は事件が起こるが犯人はわからない。
そこで視聴者はセカンドライフの中に入り、犯罪者が誰なのかを推理するというゲーム仕立てになっている。

このプログラムのために、ESCではセカンドライフ用のブラウザーも制作。
今までのセカンドライフのインターフェースではとっつきにくいというヒトも簡単に使えるように
ブラウザーそっくりのUIにセカンドライフのインターフェースを作り替えた。

そもそも、セカンドライフの中で色々な場所を作るものの、
それがあまり宣伝されずいまいち盛り上がらないという現象が多く見受けられるが
作ってもプロモーションを行なわなければヒトは来ないというもの。
このCSIのプロジェクトでは、テレビ、ネット、バーチャルワールドの
三位一体で色々な角度で作り上げる実験プロジェクト。

もちろん広告パッケージもしっかり作ってあり、
テレビCM、バーチャルワールド内の広告、テレビのエピソード内の
プロダクトプレースメントをパッケージで販売している。

上記YouTubeのtrailerの中でも既にCiscoの看板が見えている。
どんな会社でも広告を出せばよいというものではなく、
CSIのハイテク、最新鋭というラボのイメージに合った広告主が入ることで
引き立たせている。

ESCではこのプログラム用に特別なロードバランサーも開発したとのこと。

新しいテレビ番組のあり方、新しいバーチャルワールドのコンテンツ制作のあり方、
新しい広告のあり方などに大きなヒントを与えてくれそうなこの番組、
10月24日が第一回放送ということで、楽しみです。

ちなみにESCは日本の会社ともこれから色々なプロジェクトを行う予定で、
日本オフィスも年内には立ち上げるとのことです！