Godrej enters virtual world to draw next generation

MUMBAI, INDIA: Godrej Group, one of India’s leading business groups, announced on Thursday the launch of GoJiyo.com, which is claimed to be India’s first online virtual world.

It is a virtual world but has integrated the elements of social networking such as online gaming, virtual reality, making friends, interactivity, chatting, avatars, 3D environments, earning points for rewards and many more that provides integrated virtual online user experience, said the company.

According to Tanya Dubash, Godrej Group’s executive director and president for marketing, the process of re-branding and marketing of the Godrej brand and products was started two years back with various campaigns and promotions.

“The idea of re-branding the Godrej brand is to connect it to the youth consumers across India which are not so familiar with Godrej compared to older generations. And so the new GoJiyo platform will help to link the Godrej brand to the youths as well as will provide them an immersive online virtual world experience,” Dubash said.

Godrej partnered Customer Centria that has designed, developed and provided the technology and IT support for creating GoJiyo.com.

While speaking to CyberMedia News, Customer Centria’s managing director Vinay CR said, “It’s a browser-based platform integrated with 3D and web perspectives and built on Unity platform which is used for developing games and web interactivity.”

According to Vinay, the Unity platform is very rich, multi-layered and light platform due to a lot of caching in the browser, while platforms like Second Life and OpenSim are heavier, non-browser based downloadable clients for virtual worlds.

“During the development we have consciously kept in mind the issues related to Internet speed faced by people in India and hence the GoJiyo.com can easily work on minimum 256 Kbps speed,” he added. Moreover, the Unity player is a plug-in for iPhone that will allow users to access GoJiyo.com on the mobile in future.

Talking about GoJiyo, the world is populated by inhabitants called avatars, which are from the real world, leading life there under different identities with different looks, attire, and styles that can be changed as per one’s choice. In total there are six worlds within GoJiyo that includes Solaria, Noom, Turqua, SnowFlash, MauryaPrasth and Re-Janm.

Noom is the imaginary town located on moon after India discovered water there and has algae farms to produce oxygen and is more of futuristic. While MauryaPrasth takes the users to the past era of ruler Chandragupt Maurya and Solaria offers the contemporary life.

GoJiyo.com will be finally be launched in the coming week, however its beta version has already attracted over 10,000 registered avatars.

Though virtual world like Second Life have been around for over a decade now, its popularity among businesses as well as users is very low. And not many corporate entities will take the virtual route but would surely go for a micro site and would add some interactive features rather than creating virtual worlds. Will GoJiyo be able to change that scenario?

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