(Image, oddly enough, from Rocker’s World).
The Phillipines island is expanding its partnership with MTV Networks by branching out into Second Life to try and lure young international virtual world-ers to its country. The move is slightly at odds with the SL demographic – the claim is that 70% of visitors to the country are ‘youth travelers’ and I suppose if we’re all still youthful in our late 30s and 40s we’re good to go.
The project, Awesome Phillipines, created with MTV Revelations, has already been launched in SL. The virtual world provides a glimpse into tourist life on the island: diving with sharks near the Donsol River, windsurfing off of Boracay, flying above the Chocolate Hills; and visiting Mount Mayon, the island’s famous volcano. Just writing these things makes me want to jump on the next plane to Manila, which my iPhone shows to be 32 degrees and raining every day for the next week, and for that matter has said the same for the last month (why I track the weather in Manilla on my iPhone is a whole other story).
“As a tourism board, we recognize the value of engaging young people online and we embrace co-creation alliances with our guests,” said Joseph “Ace” Durano, the Secretary of Philippines Department of Tourism, in a statement.
Which reminds me – whatever happened to that sim Dizzy Banjo was involved with which was a post card to Costa Rica? Incredible sim, and it really did make me want to book a ticket.
Virtual tourism is a great use case for VWs. There are many great examples in SL including city based ones like Dublin inSL. Mexico was also a very successful project, which has been extended for years beyond its original timeframe.
The Costa Rica Cocos Island sim ( http://dizzybanjo.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/costa-rica-tourist-board-uses-virtual-worlds-to-promote-tourism-cocos-island-second-life/ ) is actually designed to promote environmental awareness of the island, not encourage visitors. It’s still there, in fact it was recently moved on the grid to integrate with the very successful series of Costa Rica residential sims run by Giancarlo Takacs. This was a great move by Costa Rica to integrate an official presence of theirs with an unofficial but highly successful resident run presence.
Oh! nice Dizzy!
The Costa Rica sim was amazing – so well done. And yes, that’s a very good move to ‘integrate it’….post cards are great, but when you can actually ‘live it’ (or live next to it), it’s even better.