Twinity has announced that it has been awarded funding by the government of Singapore for its development of a virtual equivalent of the city. Twinity is a virtual world which aims to create virtual replicas of the leading cities of the world. They have already built Berlin, with Singapore and London next in the pipeline. For more background, check out my interview with Twinity's Chief Marketing Officer from our Unplugged gathering earlier this month. As part of the deal, Twinity will also be launching geo-tagging capabilities in the virtual world. Presumably this will involve media assets, such as pictures or videos, of real world places being connected to the virtual equivalent in Twinity.
The aspect of the announcement which most interests me is the fact that that they have attracted government funding for this. Metaversum are quite open about the fact that developing mirror worlds is an expensive operation – a potential disadvantage against competitors such as Second Life which can mostly rely upon users for content generation. If Metaversum could attract local government funding for development of more cities, that could go a long way to alleviate the problem. Whilst I'm sure many governments would not be easily persuaded to put money into a virtual world, some could embrace it, perhaps as a tourism marketing exercise or to help in a real world regeneration effort by improving the virtual environment first to create a buzz around an area.
"We're very excited about being awarded funding for launching virtual Singapore, geo-tagging and our other Co-space™ projects. We see it as recognition of the strategic importance of a real context for virtual cities for city authorities and local business alike," commented Jeremy Snyder, Managing Director of Metaversum Asia Pte Ltd. He continued, "We look forward to helping Singapore transform itself into the virtual information and communication hub for Asia."