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The mysterious Conduit Labs has gone through pains to keep its nature under wraps. The company’s stated goal is to create online social experiences that are as rich as those we have offline, and it has managed to raise $5.5 million from Charles River Ventures and Prism Ventureworks without even launching a product.

Yet, despite numerous appearances on gaming conference panels from its CEO and co-founder, Nabeel Hyatt, and buzz surrounding the fact that one of Rock Band’s game designers is involved, no one has had any idea what Conduit Labs is actually doing.

Now, thanks to the magic of FriendFeed and some sleuthing on Twitter, I managed to get myself into the company’s alpha site, LoudCrowd, and while the alpha version of LoudCrowd does not reveal the full scope of Conduit Labs’ secrets, it does offer some enticing hints.

So far, it seems that LoudCrowd is part virtual world, part social network and part casual game. Before I began, I created an avatar using only the most basic set of options. I could pick skin color, hair color and sex. I then uploaded a photo, hoping that it would map my face to my avatar, but it didn’t. At this stage, photos are just used so other people could identify me on the dance floor.

Dance floor? Yes.

Right now, LoudCrowd’s experience centers around a rhythm-based dancing game that is like a far simpler version of Dance Dance Revolution — a Dance Dance Revolution for the casual gaming set. The key to the game is pressing arrow keys at the right time. I won points when I brought out my skills and won more points when fellow dancers chose me as a partner.

These points, as you might have guessed, can be used to jazz up my avatar. Currently, LoudCrowd simply automatically offers new items, like “space” jackets, pants and hats. I imagine that down the road, one will be able to select from a range of options and, of course, pay real cash to make one’s virtual self exceptionally special.

Conduit Labs has built the whole game on Flash, and the talents of the company’s designers are abundantly clear. The game is simple and fun, the look is cartoonish, but not cheap, and the animations are great. While the dancing game could get old eventually, it’s clear that there will be many others to play as LoudCrowd develops. Hyatt once told me that Conduit Labs has “no desire to rebuild a social graph,” so I expect it will leverage those that already exist — perhaps by using Facebook’s Friend Connect or building the whole package into the social networks, themselves.

As an interesting aside, it seems that the company paid $39,000 to buy the LoudCrowd url.

We have reached out to Hyatt for comment and will update when we hear back.

(Thanks, Annie Ok!)

Loudcrowd Preview by Conduit Labs from conduitlabs on Vimeo.

Conduit Labs is a secretive new company, not launched yet, but which says it wants to build a new social network: One built around virtual world gaming, but with networking components that reflect real life, just like Facebook does for students on college campuses.

It has just received $5.5. million from Charles River Ventures and Prism Ventureworks.

Conduit Lab founder Nabeel Hyatt and Susan Wu, a virtual world games expert who led the investment for Charles River, are coy on specifics. However, they says there’s something missing in the experience of today’s most popular games, such as World of Warcraft: Interactions designed around real-life relationships.

Friends playing on WoW, but who live far away from each other, can only hang out online. They can also meet at Second Life or other online worlds and gaming sites, but they can’t go out and play a casual game of basketball on a Saturday afternoon.

Conduit Labs, based in Cambridge, Mass., wants to combine the social web of real life, as embodied in social networks, within a meaningful virtual environment that could include virtual pick-up games of basketball, or any number of other activities that friends might want to do together — karaoke, dancing, etc. It would still be online, only much more realistic.

Wu was an early skeptic about Second Life, because it didn’t offer these things.

Conduit wants, in part, to improve upon Facebook’s carefully plans meaningful social interactions on its site. Facebook features such as news feeds and mini feeds show people what their friends are up to and what their common interests are. Email notifications and pokes create an experience for Facebook users similar to a real-life community bulletin board, or pen-pal correspondences between friends, Wu says. However, most of these communications aren’t in real-time. There’s little instant messaging and no instant gratification of real communication.

The promise of the gaming angle, as proven by World of Warcraft and other online gaming worlds is that friends can interact in real-time, Hyatt explains.

Carefully designed social interactions have the potential to create the next generation of online relationships, they say. Hyatt and the other Conduit founders have a strong background in building online games and worlds, having worked on such diverse mainstream hits as Guitar Hero, Lord of the Rings Online and Asheron’s Call.

The market opportunity, Wu and Hyatt stress, has been recently highlighted by Disney’s purchase of kid virtual world Club Penguin. That site developed a paid-subscription service and virtual goods that allowed the company to grow without taking on VC funding.

In short, it’s all a little vague. We’re not entirely sure how the company can improve on instant messaging and real-time video interactions that are already possible. We do know, however, that Wu has given a lot of thought to gaming. So we look forward to following this company as it emerges.