Oriental Dispatch: Nurien, MiniLife, Kloseup, Zeb

I can't read Korean, but did find many interesting services in Korea.

Nurien
Nurien uses CryEngine (you may know Entropia and BlueMars use it) and offers a superreal virtual world. (See video below!). Members have their own profile page, enjoy chatting and games like a quiz show or a dance compettion.

Nurien plans to launch in China, Hong Kong this year. and do a USA release next year.


Mini Life
Cyworld, Korea's leading Social Networking Service which has 22 million members(!) in Korea, has launched a new 3D world called Mini Life in June.


Kloseup
kloseup is a online machinima making service. Select scenes, animations, and create movies. Adding that, you can upload google sketchup files.



ZEB
I don't have much information about ZEB. I tried to visit the website again, but no response. The service is continuing?

Korean Showcase

Earlier today I did some Nipponese blogging and thought to Go Asian all the way and visited the Korea sims. It's a small 2 x 2 sim cluster that looked nice from satellite view. I dropped in and saw a neat grid with largely western architecture. It was untill I saw the marketplace that I got an idea what this was about. The market did ring a bell though, as it looked a bit like the ones in Welcome Area (ahern) so I dug into it a little deeper.

The complete sim is Linden owned, buildt largely by Brian Linden who made a fair job at it.

So this is the works they pull to try and get 80 million Koreans to move from Cyworld to SL.

However, at the Welcome area it was primarily Portugese and English that was being spoken.