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Roadmap
Inputs
The main body of the roadmap.
On this Page
I.
Industry Conditions (18
pages)
1.
History
2. Current
Conditions
3. Constants
4. Assumptions
Link directly to any input - Copy the link from the lowercase letter to the right of the input.
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Metaverse
Roadmap Foresight Framework
Inputs were solicited in four topic areas:
I. Industry Conditions, II. Forecasts, III. Issues
and Questions, and IV. Problems and Indicators.
These were divided into nineteen
categories, from History to Progress
Indicators. Each was also considered in three
subcategories: A. Technology and Science,
B. Business and Economics, or C. Social, Legal
and Other domains. This is an adaptation of the
Foresight Framework Model of
Dr. Peter Bishop, chair of the Futures
Studies masters program at the University
of Houston.
Foresight frameworks call forth a broad
set of future-relevant information, but
do not fully address any category. For each input,
category and subcategory assignments are arbitrary
and arguable. Some contradict each other due to
controversy, uncertainty, and the breadth of community
perspective. Some original quotes remain, but
most have been edited and interpreted by ASF staff
in subsequent research. We apologize for
any mistakes or misrepresentations, and hope you
enjoy this rich source of community insight relevant
to the future of the 3D-enabled web. |
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Have additional
entries or feedback?
Those who do so can be publicly acknowledged
at the Contributors
and Reviewers section of this website. |
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1.
History. Relevant facts in the history
of metaverse development.
1A. History - Technology and Science
| •
In 1967 the Canadian
Geographic Information Systems came online.
This was the world's first operational computerized
geographic information system (GIS), built
by Roger Tomlinson at the Canadian Department
of Energy, Mines and Resources. |
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| •
In 1977, the Apple
II microcomputer (followed by the IBM
PC in 1981) launched the mass market home
computing revolution. |
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| •
In 1978, the first "1D" (text-based)
chat world, MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon/Domain), by Essex University's
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, emerged.
It spawned a decade of increasingly popular
text-based virtual communities run on servers.
Also during this year, Scott Adams created
Adventureland,
the first text-based themed virtual world
for home computers. Also in 1978, Ward Christensen
created CBBS,
the first privately operated BBS (phone in
community) in Chicago, IL. BBSs were run by
system operators ("SysOps") and
added a new level of decentralization to virtual
community. |
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| •
In 1984, the Apple Macintosh
became the first commercially successful personal
computer to use a graphical user interface
(GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard
command line interface. This metaphor, copied
by the Microsoft Windows operating system
in 1985, opened up the computer screen as
a visual portal to cyberspace in an intuitive
point and click metaphor. |
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| •
In 1987, the first 2D chat world, or "graphical
MUD," Habitat,
by Lucasfilm's Chip Morningstar and Randy
Farmer, was launched. Habitat was the first
successful attempt at a large-scale commercial
2D virtual community. In Habitat the user
was represented as an avatar,
a term coined by Chip Morningstar from the
Sanscrit avatara (incarnation of a higher
being). |
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| •
In 1993, Mosaic
became the first widely distributed web browser
(multimedia graphical user interface), to
run on the Windows operating system. It opened
the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed
information services (websites, databases,
etc.) to the general public and began the
modern Web era. |
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| •
In 1994, beginning in Japan, hardware-accelerated
3D and dedicated graphics/polygon processors
began appearing in console games like the
Sega Saturn and Sony
PlayStation (1994 Japan, 1995 U.S.), and
Nintendo’s cartridge based Nintendo
64 (1996). This hardware advance enabled us
to move from planar 2D worlds and 2.5D sprites
to true 3D games. |
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| •
In 1994, Dave Gobel spun Knowledge Adventure
Worlds (renamed Worlds
Inc. in 1995) out of Knowledge
Adventure to create fully navigable 3D
virtual worlds for global users of the internet.
In 1994 KAW created the worlds first avatar-based
3D chat (Worlds Chat). In 1995 Gobel made
Starbright
World, the first broadband virtual world
and one of the first VW therapy applications,
to help hospitalized children overcome their
isolation. This same year Ron Brivitch and
others at KAW developed an internal project
called AlphaWorld, which included limited
property rights, multi-user peer-to-peer construction
tools, drag and drop objects that appear to
all users simultaneously, teleportation, user-authored
worlds, and AI-based bots. AlphaWorld became
Active
Worlds in 1996. The first users immigrated
into AlphaWorld
on June 28, 1995. The public 3D metaverse
begins. |
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| •
In 1996, Nintendo’s, Super
Mario 64 introduced a new era for the
3D platform game genre, allowing players to
creatively explore and interact with a virtual
world in three dimensions without restriction.
This year also saw the first 3D MORPG (multiplayer
online role-playing game) Meridian
59, by Archetype Interactive. Though simple,
this player vs. player (PvP) combat game enjoys
a small, loyal subscription base even today.
In this same year multiplayer online role-playing
games (MORPGs) gain the technical ability
to expand player numbers beyond small groups
(8-16) to very large player numbers (3,000+).
Massively multiplayer online role-playing
games (MMORPGs, "mor-peg's") and
all their social complexities, emerged. |
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| •
In 1997, Ultima
Online (UO) became the first 3D MMORPG.
Ultima saw peak subscribers of 250,000 in
July of 2003. Still has 150,000 subscribers
in June 2005. Also in 1997, Electric Communities
beta tested the fully distributed virtual
world platform EC Habitats. WorldsAway and
The Palace were two other early persistent
worlds that debuted as technical innovations
but business failures during this time. As
Randy
Farmer notes, persistent virtual worlds
without an obvious role playing goal require
significantly more initiative and creativity
from their populace, and business models must
expect them to be much slower to gain traction. |
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| •
In 1999, Nvidia introduced the GeForce
256, the first PC card built around a
GPU (graphics processing unit) a microprocessor
that brought parts of the geometry rendering
pipeline into specialized silicon. Prior to
this, all 3D cards for desktop PCs were simply
aids to the CPU. [9] |
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| •
In 2003, Second
Life debuted, the first 3D persistent
virtual world that allows its users to retain
property rights to the virtual objects they
create in the online economy. After a period
of low initial growth, by May 2006 Second
Life has more than 230,000 downloads to date
(paying no subscription fee) and a transaction
volume (virtual GDP) of US $60M per year.
By Nov 2006 these figures have jumped to 1.7M
downloads and a $220M/year economy (marginal
rate). Though Second Life has no overt goal
unlike a role playing game, the culture and
economy are now sophisticated and lucrative
enough that common physical world goals of
exploration, socialization, and commerce have
become sufficiently rewarding "in world"
for many users. By late 2004 it was clear
to early observers that this was the first
persistent world platform that had made it
"over the hump" into sustainable
exponential growth. While performance, interface,
and technical issues persist, this version
of the metaverse is both a business success
and a great training ground for first generation
virtual creativity. |
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| •
In 2005, Google released Google
Maps, a free web server GIS application
that can be embedded on any website using
the Google API. This same year it also released
Google Earth, a free downloadable virtual
earth simulation based on satellite imagery. |
|
| •
In 2006, the Google API was updated to support
geocoding, and Google
SketchUp, a free professional 3D modelling
program, was released. A SketchUp add-on allows
the user to export their 3D model as a .kmz
file into Google Earth, allowing accurate
geo-referencing and accurate placement of
those models in Google Earth. The era of public
annotation of the planet begins. |
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• In 2007, Second Life announced
they would release their complex (and for
newbies, difficult-to-use) VW viewer software
to the open
source community for modification and
customization. As CEO Philip Rosedale says,
"this extends the control Residents
can have over the Second Life experience
and allows a worldwide community to examine,
validate and improve the software’s
sophistication and capabilities.”"
The Second Life platform continues to accelerate
in membership. When we first began tracking
it, accounts doubled from 160,000 to 330,000
accounts in four months (March to July 2006).
Secondary to massive recent media exposure,
the last three doublings have occurred an
average of every two months, to 2.5 million
accounts by Jan 2007. Over US $1M in transactions
occur daily, on average, "in world."
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1B. History - Business and Economics
| • In 1994,
the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGS) was formed,
with eight charter members. OGS was the first
private sector organization of companies,
government agencies and universities chartered
to develop public interface specifications
to geo-enable the web. Now with over 310 member
organizations. |
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| • In 1997, users of MMOGs
began treating inworld game items as assets
that could be exchanged for real world economic
value. Monetary exchanges of player accounts
and the promise to provide game items to players
in world, began on the new online action website
eBay (named
in Sept 1997). |
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| • By the early 2000's,
the cost of creating popular MMOGs numbered
in the millions per project. |
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| • In 2001, the economist
Edward
Castronova published the first online
paper analyzing the impact of virtual economies.
He notes that the GDP per capita in EverQuest's
Norrath, the most popular synthetic world
for U.S. players at the time, was four times
higher than that of India and China[3]. |
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| • In 2002, Project Entropia
(now Entropia
Universe) launches as the first virtual
world where virtual currency can be exchanged
for US dollars. It was also the first synthetic
world seeking to attract the advertisement
of real world services within the game world.
[1] |
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| • In 2005, virtual worlds
commerce was estimated at $30M in the US and
$100M globally. The number of online worlds
was doubling roughly every two years, consistent
with Moore's
law [1]. |
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1C. History - Social, Legal and Other
| •
In 1981, Vernor Vinge published True
Names, perhaps the earliest story
to present a fully developed concept of cyberspace
as an alternate world. |
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| •
In 1982, William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace"
in his novelette, Burning Chrome.
The "cyberpunk" genre of science
fiction emerges. |
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| •
In 1985, the term "avatar"
is introduced as the goal of the computer
game Ultima IV (the winner becomes "the
avatar"). In later Ultima releases and
in the online virtual world Habitat (1987)
the avatar is the players on-screen visual
persona. |
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| •
In 1992, Neal Stephenson, in his science fiction
novel Snow
Crash, coined the term "metaverse"
for immersive 3D online worlds, and also popularized
the term "avatar" for 3D simulations
representing the user. Coinciding with the
emergence of the world wide web, Snow
Crash helped many early web users to
begin to perceive the "space behind their
screens" as nothing less than a fundamental
new informational dimension to physical space. |
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| •
In 1995, software developer Bruce Damer (author
of Avatars!
Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the
Internet, 1998), anthropologist Jim
Funaro, and science fiction writer Keith Ferrel
started the Contact
Consortium, a network to serve as a catalyst
and forum for the emerging medium of multi-user
virtual worlds and virtual communities in
cyberspace. |
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| •
In 1997, Doug Crockford wrote but did not
publish "Living
Worlds Considered Harmful", a critique
of the VRML web-based virtual reality community,
which prioritized 3D graphics and standards
over enabling "socialization" (the
development of social communities within worlds).
Adoption of VRML, an early attempt at metaverse
1.0, ceases shortly afterward. Crockford published
this essay for historical value in conjunction
with the Metaverse Roadmap Summit 2006. |
|
•
In 2004, according to the Entertainment
Software Association: [7]
-
more than 50% of the US population over the
age of 6 plays video or computer games at
least occasionally.
- 43 percent
of game players are women.
-
97 percent of games are purchased by adults
over the age of 18
- 60 percent
of parents play games with their children
at least once a month
- the
average game player is 29 years of age. |
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| •
In 2004, Marvel Comics sued NCSoft, publisher
of City
of Heroes (CoH), the first major MMOG
based on the superhero comic action genre.
Their suit alleges CoH's powerful character
creation and modification system only allows,
but actively promotes the creation of characters
whose copyrights and trademarks are owned
by Marvel. The suit is settled for undisclosed
terms in 2005, and the issue of physical world
intellectual property infringement by players
in virtual worlds becomes increasingly important. |
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| •
In 2005, in Korea, successful lawsuits have
been conducted against game providers by those
who have lost their virtual items due to game-server
insecurities [1]. |
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| •
The Milestones
Project is an online respository for the
history of advances in data visualzation.
Roughly 1,000 images, 6,000 BC to the present.
Michael Friendly, York U. |
|
| •
A brief history
of virtual reality. University of Illinois. |
|
| •
A good source for the business, cultural,
and some of the technical history of video
game development is Steven Kent's Ultimate
History of Video Games, 2001. |
|
| •
An brief
history of Active Worlds, 1985 to present.
See also "A
Brief History of the Virtual World"
(Bruce Damer Interview, CNET)," 2006 |
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2.
Current Conditions. Important
current conditions in the metaverse industry.
2A. Current Conditions - Technology and
Science
•
Web
2.0 (Participatory Web) technologies,
led by innovative social networks, browsers,
and search platforms, are accelerating the
use of 3D and other rich media. The Participatory
Web is tools and platforms that empower
the user to tag, blog, comment, modify,
augment, select from, rank, and talk back
to the contributions of other users and
the world community. Reputation-based public
wikis, like Wikipedia,
are pioneering examples of participatory
web technology. Open APIs for tagging the
web and tying it to the world, like Google
Maps, are another. Rich media-enabled
social networking sites like MySpace
are another. Another is the open source
Flock
web browser, which encourages RSS aggregation,
automated blog posting, photo sharing, gathering
and indexing of web searches, and other
participatory technologies. In Japan, companies
like GaiaX
have built social networking websites that
allow their users, as one of many community
options, to invite each other to online
games and virtual worlds. This makes the
social network the hub and the virtual worlds
the occasional immersive experience [16].
Today's browsers are just beginning to manage
3D web capabilities (3D graphics, games,
and video). Opera
9, for example, includes "widgets"
that make it easy for users to organize
their online games. The ability to easily
incorporate YouTube
and other video in leading social networking
sites has really improved the stickiness
of online community. Nevertheless, there
is much to be done. We are very early in
collaborative productivity software, like
Writely
(Google's online word processor). We don't
have robust data interchange, rich annotation
(video, etc.), or conversational search.
We don't have good security, privacy, identity,
or reputation. We don't have worldwide ultra-broadband
or wireless connectivity, which greatly
limits efficiency and scope of the collaboration
space. Within 3D spaces, we don't have easy
access to professional digital modelling
tools, or grid computing for data rich simulations.
There is a lot to be done, this is a very
incomplete list. |
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| •
Internet penetration in the US homes in 2006:
42% of Americans have broadband at home. 71%
of "active users" (those going online
at least once a month) have broadband, and
over 85% have dialup or better. 35% of all
internet users post content to the web. [14].
According to Nielsen/NetRatings,
less than half of all Americans (142 million
of 295 million total) were active internet
users in 2004. Countries wth better quality
and more ubiquitous broadband, like Korea,
are likely to have significantly higher percentages. |
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| •
Software and story are today the prime indicators
of success in online virtual worlds. Hardware
(speed, graphical realism) and interface intutiveness
remain important, but they are not the primary
drivers of game success, as originally envisioned
by virtual reality pioneers. Hardware and
interface may be more negative factors, limiting
the size of the market rather than driving
differential success among offerings, at least
in more mature markets. In the history of
the video game industry, market share consistently
accrues to stories that mentally and emotionally
engage the user and are accessible by simple
interfaces. Even virtual worlds like Second
Life, which have deficits in graphical
realism (several generations behind the state
of the art), interface ( a nonintuitive system
requiring real dedication to learn to use)
and traditional story (being entirely user-driven)
nevertheless have a strong niche that caters
to users desiring the freedom to create their
own story, in a framework that encourages
the marketing of their digital creations to
other users. Even for proprietary platforms
(consoles, portables), the quantity and quality
of software titles remains the key market
differentiator [1]. |
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| •
The dominant virtual world story to date is
medieval
fantasy. This is probably because our
primary Western and Eastern cultural mythologies
are fantasies and fables adapted from our
distant past. Though we can expect a broader
range of fiction and nonfiction worlds, medieval
fantasy dominance may be very slow to change. |
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| •
Pluralistic standards. There are many standards
bodies: ISO,
ANSI, W3C,
etc. and many competing standards that find
their own niches. As examples in the 3D Web
space, Microsoft developed Direct3D
as a Windows-proprietary 3D graphics standard,
and OpenGL
(Open Graphics Library) has emerged as
a competing open source standard. Direct3D
currently leads OpenGL in video games (both
have major share), but OpenGL has developed
a clear lead for academic research and scientific
visualization, as well as for non-Microsoft
platforms. A range of open (Scalable
Vector Graphics), semi-open (Java)
and proprietary (Adobe Flash,
Microsoft's DirectX
10, MS Vista's Windows
Presentation Foundation, XAML,
and Dassault and Microsoft's 3D
XML) 3D web enhancement standards are
in competition, and each has taken many years
to develop. Many historical 3D web standards
(VRML,
Microsoft Chrome, Adobe Atmosphere, Shockwave
3D) failed to gain traction, while others
(X3D,
the VRML successor, adopted as an ISO standard
in 2004) have had slow adoption rates and
increasing competition from other open standards
developed by proprietary groups (Microsoft's
DirectX and XAML, Intel’s Universal
3D, others). |
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| •
Independent developers and the open source
community have not yet rallied around an open
metaverse platform, as opposed to proprietary
worlds. Croquet
is a potential candidate, and the OpenSource
Metaverse Project is another even more
recent early effort, but to date none has
received major support in developer time or
funding from the volunteer community. |
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| •
3D desktop prototypes. Sun’s Project
Looking Glass, built on Java 3D, is an
interesting but early attempt to enhance a
primarily 2D desktop by incrementally adding
fast and natural 3D functionality only where
it makes the most sense. Looking Glass is
a mostly 2D environment, but desktop objects
become as manipulable as pieces of paper in
the physical world, with windows, objects,
and tabs that move, zoom, stack, and flip
in a manner that conveys an appealing weight
and physicality. Combined with intuitive mouse
or touch gestures for object manipulation,
such future desktops promise to greatly increase
the ability to manipulate and manage information.
Eliminating any signs of lag/processor overload
for the 3D components, and developing entirely
natural manipulation interfaces (possibly
touch, verbal, or vision driven) are still
significant barriers to be overcome. |
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| •
3D browser prototypes. Companies like 3B,
Browse3D,
and SphereSite
have first generation 3D browsers available.
3B's is the most participatory, allowing users
to pull in pages and graphics from sites like
MySpace and Flicker to create a "personalized
3D space" for others to view, but doesn't
yet include community or avatars. In general,
the 3D browser space presently fails to make
a compelling case. We may need to see useful
3D desktops first, then an extension of this
metaphor into collaborative 3D space and virtual
worlds. |
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| •
Location-based
games (LBG) (also called "locative
games") for mobile phones are now
emerging on GPS-equipped cell phones. In 2004,
GloVentures
demo game RayGun
pushed current GPS technology "to its
limits," updating the players position
once per second and making the player's "next
three steps matter." Mikioshi, a mobile
online games leader, makes Gunslingers
2 a combat-based cell phone LBG played
in Asia. Mogi
is virtual treasure game played with cellphones
and mobile IM in France. Human
Pac-Man was another concept game that
demoed in Singapore in 2004, where the players
used augmented reality goggles to capture
pellets and run from ghosts, just like the
1980's video game. In 2005, Blister Entertainment
launched Swordfish
and Torpedo
Bay as the first US location-based GPS
games. As geospatial
tagging (geotagging or geocoding) begins
to be added to these games, a collaborative
game reality can emerge, directing game play. |
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Creation of 3D worlds from 2D photos and video
is now possible in rudimentary form. Mova's
Contour
is a system for live action volumetric performance
capture in video, mapping the performance
to 3D and eliminating much of the post-production
work in 3D animation. ImageModeler
by Realviz, available for all the major 3D
animation packages, is another such professional
tool (using 2D photos as input). GeoTango's
SilverEye
is a similar product. MVR Summit quote: "It's
getting really easy to measure the world physically
and recreate it using data acquisition. On
this laptop computer my guys at U. Arkansas
flew over the city, wrote a program, and four
hours later had 3,000 real life buildings
virtualized with x, y, and z coordinates.
That process is automated, so we can do that
easier and easier with the demo files and
high-res photos." |
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| •
AI agents continue to make major strides in
computer animation. Massive
Software, started as an AI project for
massive simultaneous character animation for
The
Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003),
has developed a framework to provide each
character a broad range of attributes and
personality traits, and allow them to make
independent decisions based on those traits
and what they encounter in their virtual environment.
In crowd scenes, these characters animate
in a highly realistic fashion. The
Ant Bully (2006) is the first U.S.-produced
film to use the Massive crowd-based computer
graphics, but a score of other films using
Massive's system are in development. Nonplayer
characters (NPCs) in virtual worlds also are
making progress in autonomy and AI, but are
several years away from the scale and sophistication
seen in these feature films. |
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In 2005, roughly 600 million cell phones,
110 million desktop PCs, and 60 million laptop
PCs were being sold globally per year [66].
Cell phones are the most likely platform for
mobile, augmented reality interaction with
geospatial virtual worlds in coming years. |
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| •
IPv6
and next generation internet (Internet2,
etc.). In December 2003 the U.S. Dept. of
Defense announced one of the first large-scale
deployments of IPv6. Adoption of IPv6 since
standardization has been slow, due to such
factors as cost of conversion, operational
conservatism, short term industry outlook,
and difficulty of quantifying the cost of
not converting in competitive markets [68].
IPv6’s mandatory security, (authentication
and non-repudiation), auto-configuration,
multiple options for communication (unicast,
multicast, broadcast, anycast), logical group
indexing for addresses, and 128 bit address
space (10^23 addresses per square meter of
planet surface area) should be sufficient
for all global embedded devices for the foreseeable
future. In 2004 the Chinese launched CERNET2
[67] a competitor to Internet2
in the U.S. and an effort to become leaders
of the next generation internet. IPv6 adoption
will be an enabler of such 3D web advances
as internet television and geospatial platforms,
particularly in the longer run, once people
are using a mobile geospatial web in five
or more years. Likewise, next generation internet
will bring HD videoconferencing, 3D television
and other data-intensive services, possibly
beyond the 10 year horizon for this roadmap. |
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Onset cues are used for realistic motion simulation
in high-end simulators. In orienting to the
world, the human body responds primarily to
"onset cues," inital rapid accelerations
that signify a change in speed or direction.
In combination with vision simulation, a number
of virtual reality simulators (pilot trainers,
combat trainers, etc.) use onset cues to provide
kinesthetic feedback in highly immersive environments
without requiring motion through space. Link's
AH-64 Apache helicopter simulator, which requires
a security clearance to operate, employs such
such powerful onset cues that operators can
get broken noses and bruises from the impact
of virtual missiles, etc. Similar approaches
are used in amusement park rides and simulated
racing. |
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Head
mounted displays (HMDs) and Spatially
Immersive Displays (SIDs) like CAVE
for virtual reality exist, but both technologies
today are used only in niche markets. HMDs
are likely to remain niche applications
for the forseeable future (see Predictions,
Tech and Science). There are many small
HMD makers. eMagin
makes a head-mounted, head-tracking 3D
Visor with a 600 x 800p OLED
display for immersive gaming for $600. Sensics
uses the eMagin displays to make a very
expensive panoramic HMD VR system with 2200
x 1200p per eye for military customers. |
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 •
Physical
Hyperlinks (Physical World Hyperlinks)
are any machine readable identifier (1D and
2D barcodes, RFID tag, image, sound, fingerprint)
that can be resolved by a cell phone to dial
a phone number, start an email, or facilitate
a direct Internet connection. In Japan today,
2D barcodes called QR
("Quick Response") codes, originally
used for inventory management, are now proliferating
on business cards, in magazine ads and product
packaging. QR codes displayed on All Nippon
Airways kiosks now allow cellphone users to
travel with paperless electronic tickets.
On 3G phones with good built-in cameras, even
QR codes on billboards can be resolved by
the camera phone, to play a movie trailer,
provide a coupon code, etc. The current spec
has an alphanumeric data capacity of 4,296
characters. A billboard QR code presently
takes up significant space, but this space
will certainly shrink as cell phone cameras
and processors get better. See picture right,
from "New
Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Cellphone,"
Louise Story, NY Times, 1 Apr 2007. |
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2B. Current Conditions - Business and
Economics
| • Real-money
trading (RMT) (also known as virtual asset
trading), the purchase of virtual game items
and virtual currency online, through such
online enterprises as IGE,
MOGS, and
TEKGaming,
is a major global annual business, with the
2005 market size estimated at somewhere between
$200
million and 1.5 billion [13]. Many virtual
world currencies trade at rates higher than
national currencies such as the Korean won
and Chinese yen [1]. Besides blogosphere commentary
on in-game activity, RMT is one of the few
significant feedback systems today between
events in the virtual and real world. Summit
quote: "There is the idea that what happens
in the virtual can be tied to the real world.
The reality is it's only happened a few times,
real-money trade being one of these cross-over
points. And it's not supposed to happen, it's
actually against the rules in most MMOs." |
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| • Proliferation of internet
video viewing platforms, and innovative video
content distribution and revenue models. A
number of companies have recently innovated
serving video over the internet to large numbers
of users, setting the stage for the emergence
of true, network-independent internet
television (IPTV). Companies like YouTube
(70 million clips watched daily in July 2006),
Google
Video, Apple
iTunes Video, iFilm,
and MetaCafe
are leading examples. Some are also innovating
new downloading systems, like Metacafe, which
allows regular users to download desired content
to their hard drives automatically at night.
Many are creating new digital rights management
(DRM) systems for distribution of proprietary
content. Apple iTunes Video allows viewing
of reasonably priced content ($2 per network
TV show) on computer or wearable video iPod.
Google's revenue model is the most innovative,
giving 70% of the revenues from paid video
content to the content producer, allowing
independent video producers to go direct-to-internet
with a revenue model far better than they've
ever had before. Google Video is also allowing
the content producer to set the price, another
first. Some of the free user-rated content
is so interesting and tagged to user interests
that it would, if downloaded to a digital
video recorder (DVR) be preferable to
watching regular television in the evening
for some users. One can foresee a great platform
for delivering specialized video content (machinima,
tournaments, etc.) to game players and virtual
world denizens just a few years hence. |
|
| • Chasing the long tail.
A recent
NYT article [49] noted that Netflix,
the online DVD rental service, with 5 million
subscribers and 60,000 titles, has more than
half (35-40K) of these titles rented out in
any particular day. This suggests a strong
appetite for the "long
tail" [50] of 3D media content, at
least among a subset of consumers, that is
presently not being fulfilled by lowest common
denominator Hollywood video productions, but
is begining to be addressed by new media (Netflix,
internet video) in an increasingly participatory
culture. Netflix's movie recommendation collaborative
filtering system pushes consumers down
the long tail of similar but more obscure
fillms. It is so advanced that, like Amazon's,
it is a competitive advantage. We can expect
simiilar advances in recommendation systems
for social communities within 3D worlds, as
they proliferate. |
|
| • Virtual
prototyping (VP) is term from computer
aided design (CAD), development, manufacturing,
product lifecycle management (PLM), and quality
assurance circles that involves simulation
and testing of designs prior to manufacture.
Most of this software is proprietary today,
like SimDesigner
by MSC Software, and Noesis
PLM Optimization software, by Noesis Solutions,
both built on the Catia
V5 product development platform of product
lifecycle management (PLM) software leader
Dassault Systems. VP systems "automate
the exploration of the design space",
allowing designers to try different materials
and design parameters, rapidly simulating
the physical and cost characteristics of the
expected result. A few products designed in
today's virtual worlds have already made the
jump to the physical world. Tringo,
a multiplayer game designed and played in
Second Life, has been licensed for "real
world" distribution on the Game
Boy Advance in 2006. This has led some
to forsee virtual worlds potential to become
a low cost and low risk environment for prototyping
physical products and architectures. But perhaps
a more competitive future will be the ability
to run professional CAD/CAM, architecture,
PLM and other simulation software from within
virtual worlds, as specialized creation environments
for those with prototyping interests. |
|
| • 3D worlds do not yet
provide a useful work experience for most
people, nor have enough features that integrate
into people's nonvirtual lives. Summit quote:
"If I could go to these worlds and do
something [useful] I'd be there everyday.
But I'm not there just for the social activity.
As soon as they bring in document creation
or start being able to trade real things that
have value outside the virtual environment
I'm in."
Seriosity may be the first company developing
virtual worlds as online collaboration spaces
and workspaces for virtual companies. They
are in stealth mode in 2006. |
|
| • Business models are
emerging that allow humans to do piecework
in cyberspace (and with gold farming, even
in virtual worlds), and even to train simple
AI programs. MTurk,
Amazon's automated system for employing humans
in contracts for simple online tasks, launched
in beta in 2006. MTurk supports micropayments
(e.g., a few pennies per task) and the monitoring
of piecework performance via reputation. Boxxet,
a website and set of tools for generating
community-ranked topical interest pages, launched
in 2006. One of Boxxet's innovations is the
use of human web users to train support vector
AI machines to recognize valuable aggregated
content. |
|
| • Gold
farmers are individuals who acquire in-game
currency or objects by continually defeating
enemies within online games. This "gold"
is then sold to other players through third
party RMT (real-money trade) websites. Many
farmers work in less developed countries and
sell online to affluent gamers in the more
developed nations. A Dec
2005 NYT article [15] estimated as many
as 100 million people worldwide play interactive
computer games on a monthly basis, that as
many as 100,000 people in China (0.4% of Chinese
gamers) are employed (self employed or in
small businesses) as gold farmers. This latter
number hasn't been independently verified. |
|
| • In 2004, Internet penetration
in China was still less than 6% of the urban
population in 2004 [6], yet by that time China
already had the single largest population
of online gamers. This same year Chinese game
companies Shanda and Nexon announced a world
record for simultaneous online play of 700,000
users, playing Crazy
Arcade (BnB), a game where families play
a simple virtual world game as teams against
other families online.[1]. |
|
• In 2005, eBay's
Internet
Games category, hosted $30 million in
trade for goods (virtual items and currency)
that only exist in synthetic worlds [1].
Some (not all) game providers have since
banned virtual asset and currency sales,
driving much of this traffic to third party
sites. |
|
| • 2D Avatarized IM and
chat worlds are popular and profitable, more
so than 3D. There is already a healthy business
in 2D virtual world chat spaces, where avatars
navigate 2D space, make friends, participate
in activities, and purchase items. Registration
in such worlds is free but access to activities
and purchase of virtual items (furniture,
etc.) costs real money. Playdo
in Sweden has more than 300,000 registered
members in 2006. Habbo
Hotel in the UK is a similar service.
Coke
Studios (Coca Cola, Inc.) is the most
successful branded 2D world where users trade
music, wander, chat, and collect items for
their 2D "studios." Yahoo IM avatars
can be upgrade with faces, outfits, and backgrounds
for a small fee. These low-latency and efficient
2D worlds are still vastly more popular than
3D, and may remain so for some time. This
is especially evident in the Korean market.
2D virtual worlds like Puzzle
Pirates are presently trying to bring
this formula to the US and Europe. |
|
| • While 2D+ social networks
(Cyworld
in Korea, MySpace,
LiveJournal,
many others in the US) have gone mainstream,
3D worlds have yet to do so. While being on
a social network of some type is a prerequisite
to "being cool," using an open-ended
virtual world today (Second Life, There, Project
Entropia) can still have the opposite effect,
positioning you as "out of the mainstream." |
|
| • Since many of the legal
liability issues of virtual spaces haven't
been resolved, perhaps only smaller companies,
willing to take calculated risks, can pioneer
the development of virtual worlds at present.
Linden Lab
(creators of Second Life) is a rare example
of a company willing to accept the emergence
of loosely controlled user-generated content
and expression within their world, including
pornographic content on the adult version
of the world, and user mashups involving visual
imagery that is not their own intellectual
property. Summit quote #1: "As an outsider
one of the reasons why Second Life works is
because you've got management who was willing
to take the positions that they've taken on
sex and IP etc. That would seem the rare thing:
finding a management team willing to make
those decisions again." Summit quote
#2: "I was at the Austin
Game Conference talking to a big shot
from Sony Online, he was talking about how
great it was to see SL succeeding... I said
if you like it so much, how come when I play
a Sony game I can't at least upload a coat
of arms to wear on my armor? Nothing else,
just give me that. And he said, 'Oh no we
can't do that because then we'll have Nazis
running around everywhere.'" |
|
• Virtual tourism
is in its infancy. Beginning with interactive
CDs in the 1980s, virtual tourism is slowly
gaining interest. Communities from Geoplace
to the Virtual
Terrain Project exist to promote tools
for constructing the real world in interactive,
3D digital form. The attractiveness of virtual
tourism systems seems today to be a complex
function of hardware (speed and resolution),
design (interface intutiveness), and software
(story appeal and usefulness in connection
to "real world" activities). As
the market develops, software should increasingly
become the key differentiator among competing
VT systems, as we have seen with video games
and online worlds. In coming years, when
we have significantly faster computers,
and can rapidly tour "interactive Los
Angeles" or "interactive Yosemite"
and sample micronarratives before deciding
which of the many possible experiences we
will take in a given day, and when this
platform is integrated into tomorrow's browsers
and today's passive, narrative-driven experiences
like LA
City View or the Travel
Channel, virtual tourism is likely to
be a very compelling activity. |
|
| • There is a gap between
advertising dollars spent on television, print,
and other media versus video games. Of $80
billion spent on advertising worldwide, only
10% of is games-related. This is disproportionate
to the time people spend playing, so there
may be room for significant growth in game
advertising revenue. Some believe in-game
advertising can grow significantly, but others
believe such product placement will be too
disruptive to be tolerated in many game environments
(e.g., picture soft drink ads inside a medieval
fantasy game). Nevertheless, there is still
significant room for advertising around the
delivery of the game, as during free downloads
of advertiser-supported game modules. Making
a bet on in-game placement, Microsoft recently
purchased the in-game advertising company,
Massive
Inc. Michael Cassidy of Xfire at E3 2006
said "$15 billion is spent on TV advertising.
Less than 1% today spent on gamers. But 18-34
year old men spend more time playing video
games than watching TV. If you believe in
an efficient market, there's going to be a
huge shift into gamers." |
|
| • The AEC (Architecture,
Engineering, and Construction) industry is
a major constituency driving metaverse development.
They see 3D geospatial visualization programs
like Google Earth as major new tools for "location-based
simulation." The US, Europe, and
China are all experimenting with virtual geographic
environments for city planning, building,
construction, modeling. |
|
| • Local positioning systems
(LPS), extensions of GPS
tracking systems in use in shipping logistics,
allow the ability to identify and inventory
all objects in a local space, which in turn
can be used to improve the value of 2D and
3D GIS visualizations. Chief among LPS solutions
today are RFID
systems, which integrate microprocessors,
memory, modems, antennas, and power sources
on a piece of silicon the size of grain of
rice to a postage stamp. 3M sells an RFID
Tracking Solution that allows the realtime
location of physical files, and other important
objects throughout the office. Privacy advocates
have major concerns with RFID tracking, which
is both invasive of privacy and not secure,
as the chips can easily be interrogated and
spoofed. Nevertheless, their use for object
tracking, and their ability to feed this data
into visualizations, continues to grow. |
|
| • 3D
navigation systems are emerging in Japan
and Europe. 2D navigation systems come preinstalled
on many new cars, boats, and planes, and are
available on portable units for $200-2,000.
Verizon's VZ
Navigator is a cell phone service with
turn-by-turn directions and voice instruction
| | | | | |
