If your kid’s obsessed with Webkinz and Club Penguin but you can’t get them to do their chores, you may want to take a look at a new entrant into the virtual worlds scene called Handipoints.

Founder Viva Chu started Handipoints in January 2007 with the notion that chore charts would be both more fun and more effective if they were moved online. So he created a site with two main parts: one that helped parents track how their kids helped out around the house, and another that consisted of a virtual world on par with the other pseudo-3D services kids have come to enjoy.

These two parts work closely with one another to create sufficient incentives for kids to do their work. When kids successfully complete activities (such as cleaning their room, taking out the trash, or even brushing their teeth and eating an apple), they gain either of two types of points: so-called “handipoints” that can be redeemed for real-world items such as Nerf guns and toys; and “bonus points” that can be used to buy virtual goods in the online world. Parents determine which type of point, and how many of them, is rewarded for good behavior.

Setting up a system for kids to redeem points for physical goods (or money) was easy enough; all they had to do was hook up Amazon’s APIs and create a custom storefront. But a significant effort has gone into creating an entirely new and appealing virtual world, one that’s replete with different settings, activities, items, and other users.

Like Webkinz, kids can walk around the virtual world and talk to each other using canned chat (where you pick statements from a list instead of typing them). This prevents inappropriate behavior. The graphics are impressive and the functionality is rather sophisticated. In addition to buying items and socializing, users can play in-world games and watch movies (these require points, too).

Handipoints has raised $800k from Charles River Ventures and several angels – Keith Rabois, Georges Harik, Gady Nemirovsky, Robert Fanini, and Aydin Senkut. It’s been in beta since November 2007 and has gained 150k users so far, with 3.5 users per family on average (that breaks down into 1 parent and about 2 kids). Most of the service’s virtual goods are free, but the company plans on making money through selling premium goods to parents who want to make them available for their kids.

In its alpha state, this virtual world is simply a chat widget with some avatars you can walk around the screen with the click of a mouse. You can chat in real time with other people on the network and walk into a variety of themed worlds (chat rooms) with different features. It’s also obviously targeted toward kids, with its fuzzy-looking avatars and chat profanity blocker.

The more complex functionality includes friending, profiles, fame, and items. Each world has an object or character you can interact with (dancing stones, little monster, arcade games). Although, you can unlock more worlds and features by inviting more users.

However, their widget strategy strikes me as odd because it flies in the face of the safety centered walled gardens other kid oriented sites have built to keep kids safe (Club Penguin, Webkinz, and others).

Update: RocketOn updated us, stating that the widget below was part of an experiment in October of last year. Also, the company says “we’re not targeting kids. I know those initial avatars look very Club Penguinesque, but when you see the full system, it will become clear that we’re going for teens and up (15+).” We’ll see how it evolves when the final product is released.

Virtual hangouts are where people can engage each other using imaginary characters in imaginary environments. They have been around and popular in Europe and Asia for years. However, they appear to be gaining traction in the United States as of late. Some commentators even believe that the type of experience provided by these destinations could very well become integral to the forthcoming Web 3.0 era.

The newly released MultiVerse platform, which is designed for the creation of online 3D worlds, certainly anticipates a future in which developers demand the tools necessary to build niche virtual communities because such communities have gone mainstream.

Currently, virtual hangouts differentiate themselves by targeting particular audiences and providing certain types of immersive experiences.

Destinations such as Club Penguin and Barbie Girls cater to children and pre-teenagers with their simple user interfaces, basic games, and cartoon graphics. Other immersive worlds such as Second Life and Habbo Hotel shoot for a broader audience by providing more advanced chat capabilities, more realistic simulations of reality, and tools to design objects and surroundings. Then there is Red Light Center (NSFW), which targets mature adults to give them an altogether more explicit breed of entertainment.

The worlds meant for children are designed with a concern for the safety and security of their users. Webkinz, for example, only lets users chat with a preselected assortment of phrases so no one can say anything inappropriate or share personal information. The services meant for general audiences lack such restrictions and theoretically can be enjoyed by all types of people, although this freedom often translates into behavior that would be utterly inappropriate for children. Second Life, for example, does not explicitly promote adult behavior but has become notorious for it nonetheless. Embracing the more voluptuous side of human behavior, services like Red Light Center are professedly all adult, all the time and encourage users to participate in explicit behavior.

Virtual hangouts range not only in the audiences they target but also in the level of immersion they provide. Some, such as Second Life and Active Worlds, put you in 3D-rendered environments with first person points of view in an attempt to approximate virtual reality. Others, such as Gaia (“the world’s fastest growing online world hangout for teens”) and Barbie Girls, use sprites (two-dimensional pre-rendered figures) to provide a bird’s-eye view of characters moving around in largely static settings. Even further down the immersion scale, the “worlds” of certain services such as Cyworld and Neopets are produced simply using HTML images and Flash animations.

Hangouts intended for younger audiences are generally less immersive than those meant for more mature audiences. Perhaps the only reason for this lies in a child’s inability to navigate more complex simulated worlds. However, children and pre-teenagers may also get something entirely different out of virtual hangouts than adults. While adults are presumably drawn to these services because they provide the opportunity for escapism, younger audiences may treat these products as interactive cartoons and toys. Thus, while all of these services provide a similar opportunity to hang out virtually, they may possess fundamentally distinct appeals for different demographics. The variety in immersion levels will probably continue to reflect these differences.

The chart in this post provides a basic comparison of these services to convey the range of virtual hangouts that currently exists. It should be noted that we tried to draw a distinction between online worlds where people hang out and worlds where people play role playing games, as is the case with World of Warcraft and Entropia Universe.

The following services are included in the chart:

• Active Worlds
• Barbie Girls
• Club Penguin
• Cyworld
• Dubit
• Faketown
• Gaia
• Habbo Hotel
• IMVU
• Kaneva
• Millsberry
• Mokitown
• Neopets
• Red Light Center (NSFW)
• Second Life
• There
• Webkinz
• Zwinktopia