Apr 28
2009

Worlds.com, Pioneer of 3D Virtual Worlds, Announces Agreement With Pearson

Worlds.com has announced that it has signed an agreement with Pearson, the international education and information company, to develop a series of 3D virtual worlds that may be utilized for implementation within existing Pearson educational and digital programs. Terms of the agreement were not released.

“With this agreement Worlds.com begins to broaden our licensing, platform utilization and deployment with the largest educational publisher in the world. Pearson has a number of projects that virtual worlds can add value to. We are excited about this application for a broad range of their properties,” stated Thom Kidrin, CEO of Worlds.com.

Pearson has stated that it is committed to investments that complement the goals of its programs, particularly to enhance student achievement. With Worlds.com’s virtual world capability and 15 years of experience, Pearson will explore opportunities to enhance student learning and engagement.

World’s users create avatars that navigate through virtual worlds as well as build their own worlds on a P2P network. The company is building on existing formats to improve web capabilities in the 3D online environment.

Thom Kidrin said that his company is working with a broad range of divisions within Pearson, demoing the platform and its capabilities. Current efforts range from proof of concept to prototypying with existing groups that have never developed content in the virtual worlds space to beginning the process of implementation.

“A number of groups have content that’s courseware  and are looking to see how it could be used in the 3D world,” said Kidrin. “Let’s say trainers or teachers or tutors could be anywhere in the world and use that software to train the students or customers of Pearson

The education company has already partnered generally with Engineering & Computer Simulations to create education solutions for government, academic, and commercial clients. Specifically, the two are working on The Coaches Centre. Funbrain, a part of Pearson’s Family Education Network, also operates the 13-million-strong Poptropica world for kids.
Kidrin says he doesn’t view Worlds as competing with the other efforts, but offering different capabilities in the ecosystem. Regardless, education is a newer direction for Worlds.com, which has previously been more active in the social and entertainment space. 
“Obviously we’re always looking at applications and how we can diversify our platform diversification with strategic partners that already speak to large user bases,” said Kidrin. “Our approach has never been to go out and build our own systems and market them.”
A successful partnership with Pearson could expose Worlds to a large new audience of users and developers. Pearson services both organizational needs and traditional K-12 educators. Kidrin says Worlds is working with Pearson to look at a number of different properties in different silos. 
There’s no firm time line on when some of these efforts might make it in to final production, but Kidrin says that may come in late summer or the fall. 
Don’t expect a Pearson education world to funnel in to Worlds’ more entertainment-focused properties. Even though the viewer can be used to access multiple worlds, and a user of DMC’s recently launched world may be funneled to other musicians’, he or she is unlikely to connect with a K-12 program, at least at first.
“We discuss with all partners about accessibility and permissions that could be granted or declined from other world’s user bases,” said Kidrin. “There isn’t a natural extrapolation from DMC to a Pearson world. But at some point, DMC has a lot of foundation work he does. A lot of it has to do with working with inner-city kids and education, so there may be a natural confluence of users.”