The beginning of Web 3.D - Google building a Virtual Adworld?

Is this the beginning of Web 3.D? No sooner does the BBC announce its plans for a Virtual World, then this note on GigaOm seems to imply that things are hotting up for Google's plans too. This has been talked about on and off for a while of course, but adding this article to the purchase this week of AdScape, an in-game advertising house, things start to look very interesting.

We have noted before that Second Life in our view requires too much user investment (as it currently stands) for a real mainstream play. (It hurts to say that, I do like it, but I think as it currently works it is high end rather than mass market). Added to that, although it has started to show the way for in-game advertising in a 3D world, it wasn't really constructed with that purpose in mind.

Now I don't know this for sure, but I would suspect that the simpler games like Habbo Hotel have a lower total costs of sale per $ sold. It seems to me anyway that the costs of store setup, store finding, time required to make a sale and the overall infrastructure support costs are higher in 2nd Life than in the simpler metaverses. When we come to serious 3D commerce, this will start to matter.

But, again as we have noted before, the Habbo sort of environments are too simple to really have the flexibility and potential of a full 3D environment - what is needed for the mass market is something somewhere between the two in complexity and capability.

And if it was built for advertising and e-commerce from the get-go......and was easily searchable.....

If one looks at the other assets that can be mashed up in the Googleworld, like Google Earth for example, it gets very interesting indeed - imagine a Second Life virtual world made on our First Life world.

And if anyone recalls Michael Crichton's book Disclosure, and the film, there were some fascinating scenes where the use of Avatars and the representation of data in a 3D dataworld is described.

Enter the Virtual Googleverse........

So, is this the beginning of Web 3.D?

Postscript - found this article later on at Eirepreneur, who had the same thought as I did - but 5 days earlier. Pipped again