WINNIPEG FREE PRESS - Feb 26 - Weopia.com is a new 3-D virtual world dating service. Wilkie and his co-creators claim it will aid the extinction of the scary beast known as the awkward first date. Singles don't click on to Weopia to find a date. Potential couples who have already connected elsewhere in cyberspace send their avatars there on a virtual date to find out how well they'd click in real life. Avatars communicate through voice and text chat. In the near future Weopia visitors will be able to create their own custom avatars, right down to skin colour, hairstyle and physique. Weopia is currently offering a free limited trial period.
The full article was originally published at Winnipeg Free Press, but is no longer available.
"Singles don't click on to Weopia to find a date. Potential couples who have already connected elsewhere in cyberspace send their avatars there on a virtual date to find out how well they'd click in real life."
Taking the matching/discovery aspect out of the equation means this is going to kill profitability.
Posted by: Datinginsider | Mar 03, 2010 at 07:46 AM
I beg to differ. Weopia adds greatly to the matching/discovery aspect of the equation. Weopia is all about furthering the process of matching and discovery before anyone takes the time, effort and initiative to meet for a real life date.
Moreover, matching still occurs at online dating sites and Weopia helps those sites to be more successful. Research shows that we tend to like our online friend less in real life than we did while email chatting. But, if we go on a virtual date first, we tend to like that person more in real life and are twice as likely to say yes to a second offline date (Harvard and MIT research).
These kinds of innovations and improvements to online dating can only make the entire industry more potent and more profitable.
Posted by: Dave Wilkie | Mar 12, 2010 at 11:09 PM
Online Dating Sites/applications can offer 3 main tools:
* Browsing/Searching Options, Powerful Searching Engines.
* Recommendation Engines, Matching based on Behavioural and/or Self-Reported Data.
* Compatibility Matching Algorithms.
The study "People Are Experience Goods: Improve Online Dating With Virtual Dates" is only good for improving Online Dating sites with only Browsing/Searching Options, Powerful Searching Engines capabilities
and
that study does not take into account a new discovery uncovered by Eastwick and Finkel 2008; also Kurzban and Weeden, 2007; Todd, Penke, Fasolo, and Lenton, 2007 who found that people often report partner preferences that are not compatible with their choices in real life.
"Study 1: Participants (N = 132; 49 male, M age = 39.4, SD = 11.9) completed the survey by following a link on an online dating Web site."
Small sample and quite old persons! Those persons are better candidates for Online Dating sites offering "Compatibility Matching Algorithms" including personality traits as main core.
"Study 2: Participants (N = 47; 37 male, M age = 24.2, SD = 7.7) were unmarried individuals who completed this survey online as part of an unrelated series of experiments."
Very small sample and quite young persons!
Omnidate had been offering virtual dating since years, they own the "United States Patent Application 20080301557" but Virtual Dating is terrible slow and boring, looks like *SpeedDating with puppets*.
Posted by: Account Deleted | Mar 13, 2010 at 01:57 PM