Imagine visiting a Web site that allowed you to stroll down a city’s streets, check out the architecture, browse through stores, visit hotel rooms and look at restaurants’ menus. If Arnell Milhouse’s plan works, you’ll be able to do that with Providence as soon as May.
Milhouse is president and CEO of Eyegloo, a Providence company that “creates innovative business, marketing and branding constructs and business strategies,” owner of Spadyssey and Solairia Tanning downtown, and president of the Downtown Merchants Association.
His plan is to create a virtual Providence in SecondLife, an online 3D virtual world where people can walk, run or fly around different “worlds,” manipulating a camera 360 degrees to see everything around them. Milhouse’s “world” would be a virtual Providence.
“We like to keep an eye on emerging trends in the market, and SecondLife is an incubator for much of the growth of 3-D technologies,” he said. “IBM, Reebok, Toyota – they’ve all established a beachhead within this world. So … we came up with the idea of creating something that’s never been done before … to virtually put Providence on the map.”
No other city has been re-created in SecondLife, and Milhouse would be the first person to “own” a virtual city. And because of his belief that this technology is the wave of the future, he is quite excited about that prospect.
“I think that this 3-D virtual realm is potentially going to eclipse the growth and impact that the typical Internet has seen for the past 10 to 15 years,” he said. He also believes that the site will benefit businesses in the city.
“It will be a great boost to tourism, restaurants and advertising, because people from all over the world or just next door in Massachusetts and Connecticut will be able to walk our streets, peer into the shops, walk into the restaurants, stroll along the WaterFire, marvel at the architecture and see all the city has to offer,” he said.
“It’s giving people the chance to walk into the showroom, like a car dealership, and kick the tires and take us out for a test drive.”
Virtual visitors will be able to walk into a virtual hotel room and click on the bed to initiate the reservation process, go into a restaurant and see the menu and décor and even take it a step further by clicking on a menu item and seeing the food appear on the table. In retail stores with e-commerce capabilities, they’ll be able to shop in the virtual world.
Visitors can also use a virtual map that will walk them where they want to go so they can recognize landmarks when they are taking the actual trip.
“Virtual Providence presents infinite possibilities for the city,” Milhouse said. “It’s an amazing concept to understand and an even more amazing process to experience. SecondLife in general is based on the same 3-D simulation that our military is using to train troops, and if it’s real enough for the military, I think it’s real enough for the rest of us.”
Businesses’ role, Milhouse said, will be to contract with Eyegloo to put them in the virtual world.
Milhouse is offering packages priced from $1,000 to $20,000 per year, with the lower-end packages aimed at restaurants or stores, while hotels and multiple-story buildings would pay more, depending on the level of detail they want.
Milhouse said businesses are going to want to be involved, whatever it costs.
“I think it’s going to be a no-brainer, because this project is going to garner national attention,” he said.
Virtual Providence – which will be accessible through www.secondlife.com and through a separate Web site still to be named – is scheduled to launch in early May. But Milhouse said it will take longer to get the entire city built.
“There are several businesses in the city that are interested in partnering with us to be co-developers of Virtual Providence, so that has caused us to put the brakes on a little as we’re trying to create synergy among the partners,” he said.
“From the time we launch,” Milhouse added, “we expect it will be from six to nine months before all of downtown is completely virtualized.”
And if it’s successful, he may not stop at downtown.
“We have the ability to expand it infinitely, and we would do that based on the advertising and market dollars,” he said.
