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Google may be diving into the virtual worlds scene later this year.

October 4, 2007 8:45 AM

Another virtual world is loitering on the horizon, but the Google bods who may be building it are keeping hush hush about their plans for a (reported) avatar-based, Google Earth mashup. The blogosphere is buzzing with false sightings and rumoured projections. But "My World," as it's been dubbed, may be closer than we think.

Terra Nova and CNN reported on a potential Goggle virtual world last year, but since then, the internet giant has been pretty quiet, watching the froth surrounding the other, already released virtual worlds. The incident that has tongues wagging (and fingers typing) is a possible prototype sign-up/focus group at Arizona State University in the US. From ars-technica:

...it makes sense for Google to mesh a bunch of its tools into one, thus creating a whole new advertising opportunity aimed at people, er, avatars, who are "walking" down virtual (real) streets to check out virtual (real) stores and businesses. And if Google wants, it could incorporate some of its more social ventures, such as social networking site Orkut and Google Talk, in order to motivate users to spend more time there. Whatever "My World" ends up being, we think that Google will go much further than just competing with Second Life--if the company makes it functionally useful and ties it in with services that people already use, it may have a chance of succeeding at getting average Internet users to participate.

Metaversed explains why people think Google wants to get into this business:

Speculation about Google creating a virtual world began last year in part because they've created all of the tools necessary to put one together. If one ever needed a proof-of-concept for that you could look to Everyscape. Between Google Street-View, Google Sketch-Up and Google Earth, we have all of the tools necessary to mash-up several varieties of virtual world.

Whereas over on TN, Greg Lastowka amusingly posits that, "the virtual avatars will be wearing sandwich boards bearing geo-targeted Google AdWords."

Whatever the outcome - a Second Life-style immersive virtual environment or an enhanced Yahoo! Avatars - it sounds like the application will be released later this year.