The Synthravels Project is an experiment in virtual tour guidery. You can go on “amazing journeys in dreams worlds” with all the major online virtual worlds covered. You can go on a shopping tour in Second Life, have a dinner with Deathifier “the legendary owner of treasure island” on Enropia Universe, and discover the post art deco architectures of paragon city in City of Heroes. You can also volunteer to be a guide if your avatar is pretty hot in a particular world and suggest tours. From what I can gather, it is all volunteer based, and free which is pretty cool.
Synthravels is the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds. The tours and the destinations are chosen by the staff of Synthravels, composed by programmers, architects, experienced video gamers. Synthravels is based in Milan, Italy. The concept of Synthravels is by Mario Gerosa and by Matteo Esposito of Imille. [synthravels via boingboing via futurismic]
It’s great for games like Second Life where you can go anywhere you like and you are not limited by server allocation. I’m not sure how useful this would be for games like World of Warcraft where you have a multitude of servers and often you might not be allowed access to your guide’s server.
One of the founders, Mario Gerosa, also launched another virtual project which aims to protect virtual architectural heritage.