Watch out Second Life: China launches virtual universe with seven million souls

This week may mark a coming of age for virtual worlds - the three-dimensional spaces on the internet where people have their own avatars, or on-screen characters. Last night BBC2's The Money Programme was screened in Second Life, the best known of the dozens of virtual realities that are springing up. This week Sky News opened a replica of its studio in Second Life and IBM sponsored a ballet.

Yesterday the Swedish virtual world Entropia Universe announced that it was teaming up with CRD, an offshoot of the Beijing municipality, to build a virtual universe able to handle 7 million users at any one moment. David Liu, chief executive of CRD, claimed that virtual worlds would generate about 10,000 jobs in China.