[photopress:shanghai_world_expo2.jpg,full,alignright]A virtual version of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo will be launched to start encouraging visitors to the actual event. Officials from the Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination have already provided a first-look at the online project and it looks seriously flash.
A demonstration of a three-dimensional graphic of the entire convention hall will be accessible on the website so that visitors can virtually experience the exhibition. As well, there is an online forum to allow visitors to communicate with each other in real time. Multiple editions with different languages are under development.
Expo organizers expect to showcase a working draft of the project by the end of the year which is very late for something that will be on us in 2010.
Zhu Yonglei, deputy director of the bureau, said the online site is expected to attract between 15-30 million daily Internet users during the six-month expo period. The expo organizers expect the Shanghai World Expo to bring a total of 70 million visitors to the city.
Zhu Yonglei, said, ‘Some people worry that the online expo will impair the attraction of the real event for visitors. We believe that the online expo can never replace the World Expo in the real world, but on the contrary, the online version can help to bring more visitors to the Shanghai expo. It could function as a promotion tool for the real fair and also a guide.
‘We plan to develop the online expo project with the cooperation of international participants and display their pavilions and exhibitions on the Internet according to their own needs.’
The online expo website will be launched to the public on January 1, 2010, but many of the exhibited items will only be available on the Internet after the event begins five months later. This seems awfully late.
What should happen now, as in this month, is part of it should be bunged on to Second Life and the site should be up and running the moment there is something to see. Then added to. The overall idea is wonderful; the timing woeful.
Source: China Daily
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