Ariane

What if you built an awesome 3D Virtual World and nobody came?

That seems to be the question facing the makers of friendshangout.com a 3D virtual world that I just discovered last night.

I was tinkering around with evolver.com a 3D avatar maker that hopes to create a common avatar for multiple web based 3D worlds. I was using it to create a new avatar for facebook, and I saw one of the "transport" options was something called

friendshangout.com

The name sounds atrociously lame. Sounds like a chat website for lonely Emo teenagers. Who would want to go to a website like that? Curiosity, of course, got the better of me.

The website was as lame as I thought it would be, featuring lots of pics of good looking college kids with dumb smiles on their face, and a video of some blonde chick reading marketing dribble from a teleprompter.

My first reaction was "I want no part of this", my second was to see just how lame of a 3D chat this was going to be, like slowing down to look at an auto accident, or smelling expired milk before throwing it away.

So I create an account, go to the 3D chat page and pick a beach setting. My expectation dropped even further when I saw the 3D Chat runs in a web browser (remember Google Lively?). I was ready for the worst, and then...

OMG!!!



This was completely unexpected! A beautiful fully developed 3D world with awesome graphics, easy to use navigation, decent evolver avatars, that runs in a freaking web browser!

There are also vehicles to ride, and about a half dozen environments to explore. The only thing I didn't try out was the chat feature as I could never find anyone else online. I pretty much had the place to myself, which was kind of sad.

This is a quality 3D Virtual World that impressed me way more than Blue Mars, and it is too bad it is buried behind crappy marketing.

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Rock

FriendsHangout.com is built on the Unity game engine, which is now free, and the Island (the first in your pics) is the free world they supply.

I agree, Friendshangout is probably the worse name imaginable.

The general appearance is quite good, although the water leaves a lot to be desired.

The main benefit of these streamed-to-your-browser games/worlds is that you can play them on your mobile phone, and carry on where you left off on your PC/laptop.

There are more sample worlds to explore on the Unity website.

Rock

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Charles_D

No offense, but those are some killer shoulders for a chick.

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Siyu Suen

Unity is beautiful and has truly spoiled me for all other browser based games. I always think "pfft, Unity is so much better than this". So, knowing how awesome that engine is, I can't be too impressed by the Friendshangout thing... Unity deserves a lot of the credit for the awesome, and I'm sure there's a much, much better VW that will be utilizing it in the works.

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Ariane

I blame evolver.com who does the avatars. They found a way to allow you to adjust your boob size, but not shoulder width

WADE1 Jya

great world but the avatars look kind of like monsters, probably was the key fail (who wants to walk around looking like that).... but the name is a fail too, aw the whole things kinda a sad disaster really.

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Sveid Heidenstam

Is there content creation? Can I create my own little corner of the world for people to explore? That's what keeps me in SecondLife, which also has a rather atrocious name.

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Charles_D

My first thought was "Line-backer in drag."

Argent Stonecutter

You bastard, now I can't look at that picture without seeing those shoulders.

I've looked at this and another Unity based environment, and they look nice, but that's all. They look nice. You can't really do anything there that the game creator hasn't arranged for you to do.

Also, like most of the "browser based games", they're actually a misnomer. They're not based on the browser in any meaningful sense... they've basically written a complete application and implemented it as a plugin to be trendy. They could implement it as a standalone application, and call it from a browser, the way the Second Life application works... and it would be a better program. It doesn't benefit at all from the browser wrapping it, it just increases the number of things that can go wrong.

Ariane

The website does mention a developer program. I have no info as to how it works, or when they will open it up to others.

Without a dev program, you run into the "content" wall really quick. People get bored.

Argent Stonecutter

The idea is that you would use the Unity engine to build a "3d website" for people to visit. They wouldn't be able to change anything in it unless you implemented your own building system on top of it.

Ariane

By overwhelming request, I went into evolver.com and tinkered around until I figured out how to narrow their shoulders. Its very unintuitive, but I think I got it finally.