Roiworld is a flash game/community that lets users (mostly young girls) dress avatars with a given set of fashion items. Once the "donning" is done, users can participate in contest ("whose avatar is most chic") or share the looks with others who can then comment on them.
Roiworld's English website says it will launch in the US in January 2009, but there is no sneak previews available. But I assume the US service won't be too different from the current Korean service, and for those who can't check out the Korean service due to language barrier, here are some screen grabs for you.
The main service of Roiworld is "dress-up game". Users can first choose different fashion genres (casual looks, sporty looks, etc) by choosing a category. Under each category, there are hundreds of different "dress-up games" available.
For example, if you choose "casual looks" category, there are 1,035 "dress up games" available. One of them is "Leopard" dress up game, apparently suggesting the fashion items with which user can dress up the avatar are themed "Leopard prints." Click to choose the game, and you're led to a flash-based screen like this (I didn't download anything so it's 100% browser based, and it ran well on Chrome).
So this is like a blank canvas you can start working on, and obviously some fashionista girls would be excited at this point, with the anticipation of dressing up the avatar girl as they wish - well, that's not like guys, who are normally excited with the idea of undressing a girl. :)
Donning the avatar is a simple drag and drop experience - but I wish there was a "sticky effect" i.e. if I take an item near the matching body parts, the item would just stick in there. But even without the feature it was relatively easy to dress up the avatar - even someone like myself who doesn't possess any fashion sense could create this decent-looking avatar in under a minute.
Roiworld offers the same features for the "Make up game" as well - obviously, the makeup would be another area girls are obssessed about all the time. It's also drag and drop experience.
More interesting to me was the "I'm also a designer" section, where girls could post their hand-picked collections for a given fashion theme. For example, the following is someone's posting under "Elegant, red looks". Imagine what will happen when something like this is connected to real e-commerce (which isn't the case for the time being).
Speaking of e-commerce potential, the dress-up or makeup game could also be very powerful when they are connected with e-commerce. Users can complete looks, share them, and perhaps get affiliate commissions when other users buy the actual items that are part of those looks.
I think services like Roiworld have global appeal, as girls are interested in fashion and looks everywhere in the world. If done right, Roiworld could be one of few services that originated from Korea/Asia and end up being a successful global service.
