I’m finding this intriguing – China Recreation District. A project sponsored by the Beijing government (I’m taking this to read the municipal government, rather than the Beijing-based national government) to connect Chinese businesses to the world. Projects like this are nothing new, of course! After all, my first-ever internet job, way back in the early 90s, was at a company working on something similar, funded by the Welsh Development Agency. The scope and ambition of this Chinese effort is something new, though, since they’re buying in an existing and very popular European-developed virtual game world; this is going to be one avenue for us Western consumers to go talk directly to Chinese manufacturers! Very cool; I’m definitely going to have to try to visit these people once I’m in Beijing!
- Introduction
- Press release on creating an e-commerce network to directly connect individual consumers to Chinese manufacturers.
- The CRD as a virtual world
- The basis of the virtual world – Entropia Universe, created by Swedish company Mindark.
Virtual worlds (and augmented reality) is emerging slowly, at least in the US where I am. But the CRD appears to be eager to change all of this. Here I sit in the middle of the US. What if, sometime in the next few years, 150 million Chinese workers/avatars “appeared” on my desktop ready and willing to work. Shanghai would be closer to me than New York. Seems to me that if the CRD gets its way, we will all be dragged into virtuality, kicking and screaming perhaps, sooner than we think. I, for one, am preparing with my business VRWorkplace, and learning everything I can so that I know what to do when the avatars start calling. And I’m not the only one thinking ahead — Forrester’s report of January 7, 2008 “Getting Real Work Done in Virtual Worlds” recommends that IT and knowledge management workers experiment with virtual worlds now before the future creeps up on us.