Saturday, November 24, 2007

Generali's Virtual Heroes

It's been quite a while since I first noticed the Generali island, but at the time it was still under construction and closed for the public. Today I tried once more and it's open. It's a good build with a lot of detail and well designed furniture.



Generali, Italy's largest insurance company plans "to engage with the SL community and explore the nature and ‘insurability’ of risk in virtual worlds, as well as to interactively promote the Group’s image and business."



Let's start of with a few snapshots:









Since it's still early saturday morning I'm not going to describe the island but quote from Generali's Second Life flyer:


In Generali’s perspective, Second Life represents an opportunity laboratory for innovating (prototyping new products and services), learning and communicating as well as an interesting emerging market – virtual worlds inhabited by dynamic and knowledgeable users.


The main objectives of “Generali Virtual” could be summarized as follows:

On the left, places and areas on Generali Virtual

  • explore the extent to which virtual reality might affect and extend the nature of risk and risk management services
  • experiment with new insurance-related services relevant to a world where connectivity and virtuality become dominant features: insuring virtual risks in reality and real risks in virtuality
  • witness Generali’s effort in providing innovative services, and promote the Group’s image throughout non-traditional environments and communities.

The success of Second Life itself may be transient, but the phenomenon of technology-enabled virtual worlds will not and the Group is keen to put itself in a position of monitoring and learning early on in order to be ready for future challenges.

The Generali island is organized around a central piazza – the Community Area – which provides a space for presentations and virtual encounters, and potentially an alternative channel for real-world corporate events. A large screen can be used to show a registration or the live video from the event. On one side of the piazza the Generali Building provides up-to-date information about the Generali Group and links to the generali.com website. Close to it, a structure informally known as “Chill Area” is designed to provide a context for hosting some social, educational and entertainment activities of the SL community.

The large Water Tower is a panoramic view point with a room that gives a view of the whole island. The most interactive part of the island is the Warehouse Set, where a game can be played by visitors, in fact Generali Virtual offers to visitors an interactive game, a sort of “car chase” with prizes to be won, that is meant to convey a simple but effective message about the rewards for risk-adverse behaviour.


To be honest, I really couldn't spot the interactivity, tried a few warehouses but couldn't really get in. Perhaps there's a teleport point somewhere. A second thing I couldn't really figure out is what the islands' subtitle "keeping heroes safe" means.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Generali/128/128/0

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