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Virtual China looks for real benefits

Anyone who still thinks that virtual worlds such as MindArk’s Entropia Universe or Second Life are the plaything of geeks should look at what is happening in China. It is simply mind-boggling and, if it all comes off, has awesome implications for Western economies. I have written before about how the Beijing municipality in partnership with private capital (and with help from MindArk of Sweden) is planning a virtual world for around 150 million avatars, of which 7 mi llion could be online at the same time. This is so far above the capability of the much-hyped Second Life, which rarely has more than 50,000 online concurrently, that I had some difficulty in believing it.

So when I saw Robert Lai, chief scientist of the Beijing Cyber Recreation District project, at last week’s excellent Virtual Worlds forum in London, I asked him whether it was really true they were planning on such a scale.

No, he replied, it was not true. The project is much, much bigger than that. There are nine similar virtual universes being planned. China is converting a 100 sq km site (yes, that is a very big space) on the former nationalised steel mill site to house, among other things, virtual worlds able to support not millions or tens of millions but billions of avatars.

When I looked puzzled, he said people still did not realise how big a country China was. And he is right. It is tempting to dismiss all this as an Asian phenomenon with no implications for us. That would be a serious mistake. It is about the availability of broadband, not culture. The sky is no longer the limit. The world is changing.

And how. When I asked Professor Lai to explain what this was all about, he touched his shirt. This, he said, cost $1 when it left China but he noticed, walking around the shops, that it would retail at $20 in London. This project is about staking a claim to that value added. And not just in shirts. A Western avatar wandering around one of these virtual worlds could almost as easily be ordering a car built to his specification for delivery in the U.K. Goods that were made in China could have web addresses to take Western buyers direct to a Chinese website for further purchases or replacements. There will, of course, be games — they are a big part of industry these days — but this is a bold attempt to repeat what China has done in manufacturing (that is, conquering the world) in services. Be warned.

When I asked the Professor whether the coming of virtual worlds would be on a scale commensurate with the industrial revolution, he replied: “It will be faster, bigger, more like an explosion.” — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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