I’ve been exploring vSide a little lately. Its an interesting environment, and very music oriented, in fact it’s sometimes billed as a “music virtual world”.

Music is constantly playing in vSide – its effectively like a giant 3d virtual nightclub world. Graphically its very slick and knowingly “cool”. Walking though its dark neon lit urban environments, I felt much as if I would walking through a pop video or perhaps an animated Hed Kandi / Naked records 12″ sleeve.

As far as user generated content goes – vSide is limited, infact its light on content in general as its still in beta. I’m currently trying to work out the process by which music actually gets into it – who choses the tracks and how they are streamed etc. I hope to investigate this, and a audio in many other virtual worlds (mainly installable ones) over at project metaversed. However on first impressions – the way music is played in there, with track data, ratings and crossfading streams between regions is very impressive.

Events are already taking place in it, mainly dance music / youth culture shows etc. It will be interesting to see if the music industry embraces this kind of world specifically for hosting “cool” events.