clipped from: www.guardian.co.uk As a teenager is arrested for stealing pixels, Victor Keegan reports on the rise of the 3-D 'virtual worlds' that could transform the way we work, play, shop and communicate
A 17-year-old Dutch teenager was arrested this week on suspicion of stealing furniture worth £2,800 from a hotel room. Four other teenagers were also questioned about the offence. It is believed they moved the stolen furniture into their own hotel rooms. Such a minor incident might not have merited a paragraph in the local paper had it not been for one extraordinary detail of the case: the crime happened not in real life but in a "virtual" hotel in the three-dimensional world Habbo Hotel, a children's game that only exists on the internet.