9.
Predictions. Brief predictive statements
made about the future of the industry.
9A. Predictions - Technology and Science
• Social
networks (in general) and browsers (in particular)
will increasingly drive and manage our virtual
world and 3D web experiences. As Web
2.0 (Participatory Web) technologies advance,
and our social networks become increasingly
central to our lives, we can expect our MMOs
to evolve into specialized tools, where access,
reputation, and interconnectedness occurs
through a handful of our favorite participation
platforms. As the number and purposes of virtual
worlds proliferate, busy people will use them
for limited context and goal-specific immersion
(for entertainment, socializing, collaboration,
education, exploration, etc.) managed through
tomorrow's increasingly intelligent social
software and 3D-enhanced browsing platforms.
We can foresee social networks being incorporated
in tomorrow's browsers, so that community
is the foundation of online experience. |
|
 •
The Carpal PC and Forearm PC, one of the
next frontiers in wearable computing. These
popular future wearable systems might consist
of the following key components: 1)
a very lightweight OLED touchscreen
display that covers the dorsal metacarpals
(back of the hand) carpals (back of the
wrist), and a few inches of the distal forearm,
in the same configuration as the top half
of a carpal tunnel hand brace (picture left).
The other side of the hand will be bare
wrist and forearm, for maximum comfort.
The Forearm PC, an alternative design, again
wraps around just more than half of user's
forearm (a slimmer and lighter version of
Eurotech's Wrist-Worn
PC, picture right). Both versions can
be put on or removed quickly using a
slap-bracelet mechanism, allowing easy
use on the arm, at a table or in the lap.
Advanced versions of these devices would
interface wirelessly with additional wearable
items, such as: 2) additional
processors and batteries integrated in a
standard-sized belt, worn around the user's
waist, 3) a full-sized,
touch-typeable keyboard and processor worn
at the waist as a 1.75"x5" sized
belt buckle (four interleaved pieces of
keyboard). A touch of the buckle would de-interleave
it into a standard 3.5"x10" laptop
keyboard, allowing 50-80 wpm typing at the
waist. Also, 4) a wearable
mini-mouse, worn on the belt on the
opposite side of the body from the Carpal/Forearm
PC display would complete the system for
those users who wanted an interface identical
to their desktop ergonomic, requiring no
retraining. Simply looking down anytime
at the back of their hand, while typing
or mousing would provide useful visual augmented
reality information. In high end versions,
the Carpal and Forearm PC's displays could
fold out to twice their size for more visually
intensive tasks. As miniaturization improves
these systems will contain a cell phone,
GPS, digital music player, camera, etc.
The system could be connected through the
cell phone to mainframe-based high-accuracy
voice-recognition systems, to maximize the
quality and range of verbal commands to
the wearable PC. The keyboard will be used
wherever verbal commands are insufficient
or are less optimal, as they will be for
many years to come, for some tasks. High
end versions might be waterproof, and inductively
charge themselves wirelessly when you are
near a keyboard or are seated in your car.
They will also contain fast-charging nanobatteries.
An obvious accessory would be a detachable
bluetooth cell phone earpiece that fits
into the Carpal PC at the forearm or at
the waist when not being worn, and which
recharges off the Carpal PC's battery when
not in use. Wherever you are, when you look
down at your forearm you'll see a local
geospatial map, have access to locally relevant
video, audio, and text streams, and be able
to query them orally. Verbal commands and
keyboard shortcuts will give you access
to both automated AI systems, like today's
Free 411,
and to human beings in various service centers
you are subscribed to. All kinds of specific
data on the objects in your vicinity will
be immediately available, including histories,
recommendations, annotations, etc. As the
participatory
web grows, no matter where you find
yourself you'll be encourged to add your
own feedback to the global database, at
point of experience.
|
|
• Wristwatch
cellphones. The Dick
Tracy "two-way wristwatch radio"
was first conceived in 1946. The wristwatch
cell phone is an obvious developmental attractor
for many of us. Why hunt for your cell phone
when you can wear it on your wrist? Would
you even take it off to shower if it was
small and waterproof? It could even charge
inductively when your hands are near a keyboard,
as many of ours are every day. You'd want
the ablity to swap in charged batteries
and full SD chips as well. |
|
• The Dynabook.
Alan Kay's 1960's vision of a lightweight
waterproof eBook reader. High res OLED touchscreen.
Fully annotatable. Cradle or inductive charging.
Many assisted reading modes (highlighted text,
narrow-columned for fast reading, an audio
book mode so you can continue "reading"
(have the book read to you) while driving. |
|
• Ultraportable
laptop/tablet remote for the open-standard
Internet Television of 2016. Imagine your
current TV remote being replaced by a lightweight
laptop/tablet, with touchscreen and keyboard,
that displays 100 Thumbnails (10 x 10) of
TV channels, Video, Games, Virtual Worlds,
Magazines, Newspapers, Books, etc., with small,
high-res words below each graphical thumbnail
giving (title, length, ratings, etc.). One
tap down would be another 100 potential channels,
and so on. Humans pick the best images/animation
previews to represent the clips, as with DVD
chaptering today. Open source standards for
representation. People trade knowledge representation
layouts. Such a system could easily give you
organized access to thousands of your favorite
media streams or media items, all competing
to get to the top level, reorganizing based
on your feedback and the collaborative filtering
recommendations of your interest groups. For
many of us, half of our video feeds would
quickly become specialized microchannels on
internet tv, not the common denominator fare
available through today's one-to-many, one-size-fits-all
broadcast model. Today's big media aggregators
would be forced purchase the best of the proliferating
independent channels and serve them as feeds.
Independent pay-per-view and subscription
media, supported by direct micropayments,
would flourish. One could also read a book,
magazine, or newspaper on the tablet. Whatever
you read on the small screen could be mirrored
on your large one with just a click.
|
|
•
Video
Walls in 2016. Nielsen's
law (see Constants - Sci-Tech, Nielsen's
law) has charted a doubling of premium-access
internet bandwidth every 21 months since
1983. This trend predicts that fiber-to-the-home
initiatives, like today's Verizon FiOS (20/5
Mbps) will deliver over 300 megabits per
second of wired bandwidth to typical premium
users in 2016, allowing download of a 2
hour video in 2-3 minutes (impulse buy/on-demand).
As today's mature (LCD) and newer (DLP,
plasma, OLED) display technologies continue
to drop in price and energy usage, we can
forsee home and business users converting
large portions of free walls in several
rooms into video wall configurations. Video
walls would allow parallel video multicasts
(internet video, HD video, 3D worlds, etc.)
to various areas of the wall. Such systems
would also greatly improve multi-party videoconferencing,
by delivering "spatial video"
(see 8Bj)
with cameras on consenting users as they
wander through their rooms, delivering you
their image to your nearest video wall,
wherever you are in your own home/office.
As with current internet browsers, users
would likely have only a few sections of
these walls displaying full motion and sound
at any time, with the remaining displaying
static images, slowly updating snapshots
of other channels, menus, etc. These secondary
images might be in still motion until the
user "tunes" to them by pointing
a remote or saying a verbal command, whereupon
they would enlarge, animate, and move to
center screen. As a video wall controller
and wireless mobile accessory, a very light
tablet remote, capable of displaying thumbnail
pictures of your 100 favorite internet TV
channels and virtual worlds on the top screen,
and your next 100 only a tap away, etc.,
would for many be a very intuitive way to
manage a large number of content specific
3D feeds. Collaborative filtering and multiple
categorization systems could be used to
manage this information, with thousands
of ancillary channels and 3D experiences
"competing" to migrate up to higher
levels of the user interface, based on user
feedback and public preference data. Once
the internet's bandwidth can support them,
video walls and tablet remotes seem likely
convergence devices for many future users,
as they would maximize the value of peripheral
attention while minimizing distraction,
and allow the intelligent filtering of vast
quantities of video data. Their entertainment,
educational, and collaboration value as
tools in the participatory web would be
immense, though issues of addiction, cocooning,
narrowing of views, and other abuses will
also be serious concerns, particularly with
early versions of these systems.
|
|
• Finger
and hand tracking and the longstanding dream
of a gestural
interface. A laptop user's finger movements
and hand motions can be translated into amplified
yet precise movements in 3D space, using high-precision
gesture-recognizing cameras. This would allow
one do gestural manipulation in the air, just
above the keyboard, and then settle down onto
the keyboard to do typing as well. One's gestures
in the air, perhaps initiated by showing your
fingers and open palm at your screen, which
could eventually replace the need for a mouse
in future laptop computers, as well as enable
new gestural abilities. Possible scenario:
Virtual Libraries. Imagine reaching for the
image of a book sitting on a virtual bookshelf.
Being able to pick the virtual book up, quickly
flip to read its front and back covers, inside
jacket pieces, table of contents, all scanned
in from its original physcal form, with addtional
virtual enhancements added to each of these
over time. Then you drop your fingers to the
keyboad and do a search inside the book to
find something of interest. Then you annotate
at the search point with color highlight and
notes in the margin. Then you put a copy of
the book in your personal virtual library,
which you can organize simultaneously by author,
subject, chronology, etc. Would this replace
your physical library? Caveats: No tactile
feedback might limit use, especially as wearable
mice and keyboards become increasingly miniaturized. |
|
• Wearable
mouse and Tummy PC form factors will improve
mobile access to 3D spaces in coming years.
The Tummy
PC form factor, providing a small, collapsible
touch typeable keyboard and display at the
waist, allows convenient wearable computing,
without the need for complex augmented reality
display technologies. A wearable
mouse allows the user to maintain the
same input behavior they use with their desktop
machines. Combined with affordable broadband
cellular modems (Verizon’s 3G VZ
Access card is now $80/month), Toshiba’s
fast-recharging nanobatteries
(80% recharged in 60 seconds), always-on wearable
access to social networks, 3D worlds and games
will become affordable for the youth of the
mid-2010’s in the developed nations,
and somewhat later for the rest of the world.
Collapsible keyboards and chording devices
for text input will finally gain traction
in some segment of society once we have wearable
display and augmented reality platforms. Expect
more fold out and projection screens as well. |
|
• Eye and
head tracker for virtual worlds navigation.
Moving beyond today's first generation head
tracking systems (see NaturalPoint),
picture an eye- and head-tracking camera that
translates your subtle eye or head movements
in physical space into large shifts of view
in gamespace for 3D orientation. No more need
to do unintuitive keyboard movements to represent
eye and head movements in virtual worlds.
A more natural interface would also entice
more older players to explore virtual worlds.
Caveats: This may be disorienting if there
is lag between physical world head movement
and virtual head movement. Would have to be
fast and tightly coupled. There are a number
of early-adopter head tracking peripherals
today that involve having to wear something
on your head, but these will be outmoded by
better imaging technology. |
|
• Networked
shoes in personal area networks for
virtual worlds navigation. Networked shoes
may become a valuable interface for immersive
virtual worlds. Feet pedals are already
used in dictation systems and racing simulations.
For virtual character steering and walking,
minor shifts of your feet on the floor to
change direction, slight tapping of the
toes to move forward, tapping the heels
to jump, etc. would allow a whole range
of natural repertoires, and leaves your
hands for hand activities. Kids would love
peripherals like this, as they give them
yet another excuse for kinesthetic activity.
As personal area networking expands, shoes
also represent a unique place to put electronics
for wearable computing, so the first versions
of multifunction shoes (sensing, recording,
computing) might be emerge within the next
10 years. |
|
•
Early conversational avatars in 2016. Anthropologist
Ray
L. Birdwhistell, a pioneer of "kinesics"
(nonverbal communication), estimated (Kinesics
and Context, 1970) that about 65%
of the information in a conversational message
is conveyed by facial expressions and body
language, and only 35% by spoken words.
Once our computers are smart enough to speak
to us in simple sentences via a primitive
conversational
interface (circa 2015-2025), to store
primitive inferential, context-based personality
and values models of their users (first
generation personality
capture), and to express those models
using a facial
action coding language, we predict avatar-mediated
human-computer and human-human communication
must emerge. For conversations that benefit
from even crude kinsesics, avatars should
be both more humanizing and more efficient
than other communication modes. We forecast
tomorrow's users will increasingly associate
personal avatars (what we call a "digital
twin" (DT) with their public personas,
and as DT's grow in capacity, use them to
mediate contact with the larger world in
an attention-limited economy. Avatars-as-representatives,
both of humans and of complex technological
systems (cars, houses, computers, robots,
tools) will become increasingly friendly,
personalized, intelligent, and interactive
relative to text, static images or linear
narratives. Public data mining of user lifelogs
will greatly improve context-sensitive DT
values and personality modeling, and greatly
enhance social networking, personalized
education and online collaboration. Given
trends in automated knowledge discovery
and natural language processing, the DT's
of early adopters and research users should
be able to have very primitive yet useful
natural conversation with inquiring humans
by 2015, with performance improving significantly
over the subsequent decade. This conversation
will grow to include simple information
about the user's background, interests,
present location, availability status, and
future plans, as well as the ability to
schedule meetings with trusted parties,
answer FAQs, manage e-commerce, and perform
other simple transactions. Eventually, DT's
seem likely to become the first-pass communication
screeners ("trusted handshakes")
to prequalify face-to-face interactions
between individuals, an important element
of future trust networks. See IMVU
for a good example of today's avatar-mediated
chat communities.
|
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•
3D-based internet browsing is a “flying
car” future. 3D and 2.5 D browsing and
information archiving tools offer very little
payback over 2D, yet are saddled with the
additional visual complexity and cognitive
overhead of navigating the third dimension.
Initiatives like NTT’s SpaceBrowser
are likely to remain research tools with regard
to the general web. 3D "flying"
in virtual worlds and GIS-based mirror worlds
remains a useful navigation option, but even
here 2D (frames) and 1D (search box/text-based)
navigation is generally faster and more efficient.
3D makes sense for collaboration and social
space, and for some (but certainly not most)
kinds of data visualization. Randy Farmer:
“3D is not an inherently better representation
scheme for every purpose.” To understand
this, it helps to realize that humans are
not mentally living in the 3D world much of
the time, even in the way they inhabit physical
space. We are trying to simplify even our
3D activities into 2D "events,"
as happens when we read a book, or even play
a boardgame on a mostly 2D surface. 3D makes
sense in select environments, but all that
additional data always comes at a cognitive
price, slowing down our efficiency of thought
and navigation. Many times, that price isn't
worth paying, when we have the choice and
can reduce the dimensionality of our mental
spaces. |
|
• Television and the
metaverse will increasingly converge. The
better internet
television becomes, the more metaverse-like
it will be. So too with online spaces that
will increasingly embed interactive video. |
|
•
Wearable augmented reality bottleneck around
microlaser technology patents. Arguably the
most advanced technology for augmented reality
displays that has yet been demonstrated is
eyeglass-based microlasers that can paint
an image onto the human retina. This technology
is presently under the patent control of a
single company, Microvision.
It was the opinion of some summit participants
that Microvision has been primarily deepening
its patent portfolio around this key technology,
and pursuing only government and military
development contracts that do not provide
sufficient capital or R&D expertise, rather
than aggressively seeking commercial partnerships
to advance the technology and bring it to
the mass market in a reasonable time frame
at an affordable price. Until such time as
this currently underdeveloped technology is
widely available for off-patent use (circa
2018) or until Microvision sees the value
of partnering with well-capitalized commercial
innovators or licensing at an affordable price,
the wearable AR industry may continue to be
held up by this bottleneck. Long patent lifespans
and lack of the ability to challenge them
when they aren't commercialized in a timely
fasion can perversely delay rather than accelerate
innovation, and are an issue for future IP
reform. [2007 Update: Ben Averch of Microvision
states that the company has prioritized commercial
partnering as of mid-2006. Let's see what
develops.] |
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• New miniaturized user
interfaces. We can expect cell phone pieces
that disappear behind the ear, and eventually,
microlaser augmented reality devices. Almost
all of these devices will be external, not
implanted, as the interface technologies will
be continually upgraded in the foreseeable
future and the risks and invasiveness of surgery
make it a poor choice in almost all applications. |
|
• Larger, multiple, and
dedicated monitors. As monitors drop in price
and thickness, and become truly autoconfigurable
on plug in we’ll see many larger and
multi monitor setups. This, combined with
faster processors, will allow people to permanently
keep their favorite 3D web applications open,
in favorite locations on their monitors. They'll
be able to set operating system preferences
so that on restart, applications will reopen
and display in their favorite dedicated screen
locations, which will be very efficient for
multi-monitor setups. |
|
• Lifelog
systems. Within the next ten years we’ll
see the emergence of “lifelog”
systems, wearable or ultraportable recording
systems that capture and autotag the user’s
audio, GPS, 3D visual, or other experience
(travel, classes, work, private gatherings,
etc.) and wirelessly uploads this life history
to a web-accessible server for potential sharing
among friends, archiving, and later selective
examination. Such systems will be adopted
particularly early and widely by youth in
the more developed countries with technophilic
cultures (Korea, Japan, etc.). |
|
• Head
mounted displays (HMDs) are likely to
remain niche applications for virtual reality.
Other than for specialty competitive gaming,
the marginal benefit to HMDs and Spatially
Immersive Displays (SIDs) beyond the standard
Keyboard Mouse Monitor (KMM) interface do
not seem compelling. There are severe drawbacks
to using HMDs while navigating physical
space around the home (eating food, interacting
with friends in the same room, etc.). SIDs,
by contrast, seem likely to gain modest
adoption as prices drop in coming years,
because they will be natural outgrowths
of HD home
theatre installations (eg., more screens
going on more walls, either projection or
wall mounted). A low cost SID that covers
three walls of the living room seems an
archetypal advance for immersive gaming
and virtual worlds, one that might achieve
minority market adoption by 2016. |
|
• Immersive
virtual world walking and running interfaces
seem likely to remain only military and
research devices over the next ten years.
A notable exception is two degree of freedom
treadmills (speed and elevation tilt) which
might be combined with large display screens
and virtual competitors and coaches (via
videoconference) in a system that could
emerge a small fraction of high-end home,
corporate, and commercial gyms, and military
and institutional training environments
as part of the growing exergame
market. But higher DOF and "unrestricted"
walking systems like the VirtuSphere
currently
have such drawbacks as high complexity,
cost, noise level, space requirement, user
injury, and the promotion of unnatural walking
behavior. Even such clever near-omni-directional
treadmills as those of Virtual
Space Devices (see video)
are presently $1M systems, hoping to develop
$30K systems in coming years. R&D programs
like the European Commission's Cyberwalk
Project are seeking to develop systems
for "natural unrestricted 3D motion"
in virtual space, but that long-dreamed-for
objective continues to look out of reach
beyond the lab, with all technologies presently
on the horizon. |
|
• Sensory
substitution technology in augmented
reality seems unlikely to have a significant
social effect for the forseeable future.
Sensory substitution is a rudimentary interface
that has been touted by some futurists as
an additional channel to provide augmented
reality sense data to the human. There are
research devices available that use a wearable
camera and a transducer on a subject's tongue,
palm, or back of the torso, allowing the
brain of unsighted individuals to interpret
the touch patterns as a crude form of vision.
Some have suggested that such tools are
ways we will be able to increasingly augment
our normal senses through unobtrusive secondary
channels in coming years. Imagine, for example,
permanently gaining the ability to see in
3D behind you, with a wearable camera and
using areas on your back as retinas, and
having a part of your brain learn to adapt
itself from birth to interpreting such information.
Or using that same subliminal system to
be able to continuously and surreptitiously
"read" incoming text and graphics
from a 3D augmented reality display linked
to the web, while your eyes are enaged in
something else. The problem with this vision
is that this interface strategy appears
to be very limited and poor by compared
to our existing forms of sensing, and is
subject to all the same limitations of divided
attention that we find today when humans
try to do more than one thing at a time
(e.g., drive a car and talk on the cell
phone). Developmental biology and animal
studies also argue it would work better
in human youth than in adults, particularly
if used from birth with no interruption
(e.g., as some form of implant). But such
use would raise serious ethical concerns,
require extensive testing, and be very slow
to emerge. Even when perfected it would
remain subject to sensory substitution's
decreased effectiveness relative to the
naturally evolved senses. An alternative
to trying to open new sensory channels to
the brain would be a form of "sensory
specialization," to permanently assign
a part of your existing visual field to
your AR display, as with glasses or implants
in early adulthood. But again, while such
tools mayl be extensively experimented with
in future subcultures, they all seem likely
to give only minor benefit, and would come
with significant problems. In the few cases
where early benefit might accrue, as with
soccer players that have the ability to
"see through their backs," including
a topsight view of the game, relayed to
them by remote camera, the social stigma
involved with early and elitist use would
be significant. Such players would for a
very long time be relegated to playing in
minor, "enhanced" leagues, the
way professional bodybuilding now has minor
competitions for those who admit to the
use of performance-enhancing drugs. For
the forseeable future, simply increasing
the miniaturization, affordabilty, performance,
and bandwidth of our wearable computing
systems, as well as the quality of the artificial
and human intelligence connected to them,
seems to be a far more productive and socially
acceptable prescription for progress in
augmented reality. |
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• Whoever comes out with
the first "normalization engine,"
a system that allows each participating developer
to translate their virtual asset database
into an common framework, will be able to
create the world's leading interoperable metaverse
alliance, assuming their politics are appropriately
transparent and fair enough to elicit wide
participation.. |
|
• Online dating (eHarmony,
Match.com,
etc.) is a killer app for next gen virtual
worlds (2010?), ones that are able to map
our digital photos and even realtime facial
features to the avatar using web cameras.
Such tools will increasingly improve the emotional
quality of virtual space. We should be allowed
to express a desire for something intimate
and then go into a 3D space and see others
who've exposed that desire as well. Hopefully
the trust networks will be in place. |
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• Physical
objects will increasingly be metatagged.
As more and more of them gain a "media
wrapper," we will have grown a useful
data overlay to our digital geospatial world. |
|
• The next
billion people joining the internet will come
from “BRIC”
countries like Brazil, Russia, India, and
China, and a smattering from other developing
nations. They will continue to access the
internet primarily through phone and mobile
devices, rather than desktops. Investors are
flocking to this area where they are not in
other VR. Whatever metaverse we see in the
next decade must be accessible by these “thin
client ” devices and voice interface. |
|
• Persistent online social
worlds are an extraordinary tool and platform
likely to be subject to real network effects,
like instant
messaging. There will be a very small
number of very large virtual worlds, like
there is a small number of IM networks today.
Already we see pressure at the second-tier
world level for common standards. They start
banding together and then there is pressure
for even the most popular worlds to allow
interoperability. Given human psychology,
the desire for consistency, and market factors
we can expect just a few, not hundreds or
thousands to capture the majority of the market. |
|
• Summit quote: "Second
Life's architecture is going to split
as it continues to grow and diversify. Eventually
you'll log into your island like a web page.
Navigation to virtual worlds/cities/games
from that point will be a series of choices,
not a continuous geography. You'll see fragmentation
down to the API level." |
|
• Avatar-based
videophones and the limits of videophone
utility. Within the next 2-5 years we'll
see high-end avatars that can accurately
mimic your facial expressions as you sit
in front of the screen. A low-level version
of this has already occurred, with Logitech's
latest Orbit
MP QuickCam webcam, which adds mixed
reality features to webcam images and supports
gesture-driven avatars. Something like this
might make the videophone usable for folks
who don’t want their entire personal
environment accessible to the caller. Still,
even these kinds of videophones will likely
be used only very selectively. They make
sense for family, dating, early stages of
business contacts, and some forms of collaboration,
but audio will continue to be more efficient
for most conversations and allows more privacy
and multitasking for the users. In a curious
way, less is often more in communication.
Video often shatters the intimacy of an
audio conversation. |
|
• 4GLs, user generated
content, and the business model. If graphics
programs and programming languages continue
to abstract themselves, we may see the emergence
of specification driven fourth-generation
languages (4GL's) for virtual content
creation that allow programming at the level
of concepts, not code, the same way we have
seen such languages emerge for data management
(SAS, SPSS, etc.). Such a technical advance
would allow rapid scaling of user-generated
content, and greatly reduce barriers to entry
for open, collaborative virtual worlds. Small
businesses may one day build out unique virtual
worlds the same way garage bands creeate unique
music today. |
|
• The future of the computer
display. Most of us want a simple visual interface
with a lot of intelligence behind it (think
Google). The big push will be to put more
processing behind intelligent filters. Avatars
will be able to do a very limited amount of
filtering in 2016, mostly in narrow domains,
like communication media (email, etc.). But
at the same time as we elder folk strive for
simplicity, there will be many people, particularly
youth, who want to push the limits, who will
experiment with 20 windows open at the same
time, with both simple and complex things
(asynchronous chat, browsing, video, wikipedia,
3D worlds) going on in each. A fraction of
user's desktops will be totally immersive,
the way a quantitative stock trader’s
multi-monitor
desktop often is today. 3D displays will
remain as research projects and niche markets
in advertising for the coming decade. Resolutions
are fuzzy even in the best current systems,
and even the most aggressive plans (Japan’s
VR
TV by 2020 initiative) have longer time
horizons. |
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9B. Predictions - Business and Economics
• In 2016,
interactive, internet-accessing, 3D visual
environments (video, virtual, or mixed reality)
are likely to be used for at least each of
the following commercial activities. All of
these already represent healthy, growing markets
in 2006:
A. Solo Entertainment
(ex: solo IPTV or internet video and solo
3D games and environments viewed on the cellphone/PDA/laptop/desktop/home
media center, etc.) B.
Social Entertainment and Communication
(ex: non-solo IPTV, MMOGs, 3D video viewing
or virtual home page navigation on community
sites, video or avatar-based teleconference/chat/dating,
3D video and 3D virtual games, location-based
3D games) C. Income
Production (ex: paid work in virtual
worlds, remote videoconference work, collaboration
in virtual, videocomposite, or 3D mixed reality
online offices) D.
e-Commerce and e-Barter (ex: viewing
3D images or video of physical or virtual
items for purchase/swap, remote shopping using
3D video, virtual, or mixed reality worlds)
E. Education and Creativity
(ex: 3D distance learning and job training,
3D virtual object construction, online homework
collaboration in 3D environments) F.
Assessment (ex: 3D remote job interviewing,
3D remote assessment/testing) G.
Exercise (ex: videoconferenced remote
exercise, 3D virtual or 3D mixed reality active
video games on home exercise mats, treadmills,
stationary cycles, gym machines, etc.)
H. Navigation
(examples: auto, laptop, or PDA-based 3D navigation
systems). |
|
• 3D version
of the Virtual
Town Square (VTS). A "killer app"
for virtual business and community. Within
five years, some major virtual world maker
will build out a virtual downtown that resembles
some real downtown to a reasonable approximation,
ideally in a young and highly wired urban
community. If designed right, this will become
a most efficient multihop that young urbanites
use when deciding "what to tonight."
Cruising the virtual streets early Friday
evening will tell you 1)
who in your local community is also trying
to figure out what to do (chat options),
2) who in your community is already
down there doing things (their GPS-driven
avatar will be present, available for you
to contact by IM 3) what
the options are for entertainment (2d lists
in 3D, and webcam updated feeds of real world
downtown storefronts and events). Registration
for events, parking, etc. can all be negotiated
through the virtual world. The first VTS's
will drive significant traffic to those who
build them, spurring copycats across the world.
Participating VTS's will eventually be linked
in a common network, with traveling avatars
("travatars") to visit them all.
In sum, the virtual recreation of real world
urban centers and neighborhoods can become
the most efficient multihop for "what
to do tonight" as well as a new tool
for world browsing and socializing. Physical
and social availability options can be toggled
on and off, connecting the avatar with it's
controller. Active and GPS-driven avatars
can follow the real world locations of people.
Local businesses can use the system for virtual
shopping and "location ad words"
that bring you to other similar virtual recreations,
which will create new economic relationships
between the virtual network and physical places. |
|
• Smart
cell phones (some of them wearable) will be
the leading platform for augmented reality
devices in 2016. Location-based cellular data
and radio delivered to these cellphones is
likely to be the next major infrastructure
development in the augmented reality space.
By comparison to cellular, mobile Wi-Max,
mesh, and other network options will have
only minor market share. Disagree? Read Why
Max?: A Wireless Primer and Discussion on
Wireless Reality, Jeffrey Belk, Qualcomm,
Sep 2005 [66] and see if your view is changed.
Nothing is going to surpass the highly motivated
and competitive 3G WWAN data networks, whose
buildout is now being subsidized by 127 billion
minutes of voice use per month. Smart 3G cell
phones that can access open standard, Virtual
Earth / Google
Earth environments, which can be be updated
by anyone and which are capable of streaming
location based audio, images, and minor video
to mobile users, will be the next major breakthrough
in virtual mirror worlds. When mobile users
can use their cellphones just a few years
from now to "geobrowse" data overlays
on the leading virtual maps of their local
environment as they travel, to gain tourist
information, local news, entertainment options,
etc, there will be the predictable early proliferation
and then a later consolidation of these virtual
worlds. In each category (All-Inclusive, Events,
Entertainment & Dining, Local News, Weather,
Traffic, Local History, etc.), after consolidation,
we can expect just one or two virtual worlds
to receive the vast majority of user traffic.
Browsing these worlds will provide a rich
set of potential experiences, all just a click
away from webcams that peer in to these buildings
in realtime, 2D websites, streaming audio,
and even video. Local community members looking
at all this geodata will see new potentials
for alliances, co-branding of events, etc,
continually reshaping the local virtual real
estate. The most interesting of these worlds
will be perused constantly by users with mobile
navigation systems, providing a set of ever-changing
options and interfaces to physical space. |
|
•
Location-Based Cellular Radio. LBCR will
be a multibillion dollar market for autos
and mobile devices by 2016. Local wireless
infrastructure will support streaming internet
audio in the car and over the cell phone
within two to three years (2008-9) for premium
customers, and four to six years for the
mass market. This may be one of the biggest
coming new media industries currently below
the pundit's radar. Tomorrow's GPS-equipped
cell phones and handheld and in-car navigation
systems will support the playing of short
location-based images and video, and location-based
audio delivered over
cellular radio (and HD
radio to a significantly more limited
extent). Combine this with basic 3D virtual
maps and you have a handheld information
and entertainment device with compelling
new abilities. Motorola's iRadio
is a leading company in this still very
early space, though there are a number of
other entrants [60]. Cooper's
law tells us that the spectrum efficiency
of radio communication (both voice and data)
has doubled every two and a half years,
over 104 years, since radio waves were first
used for communication. As a result, we
are on track for this functionality being
possible at the premium end very shortly.
In late 2007, Qualcomm will release CDMA
EV-DO Revision B data modem and cellphone
chips to card makers, which will provide
up to 14.7
megabits per second peak on downlink
(something closer to 1/4 of this for real
world average rates). When these emerge
in 2008 they will enable such mobile features
as television, and internet browsing while
making VoIP calls, and the enough extra
bandwidth to support location-based streaming
radio in the car [26]. Imagine being able
to receive cellular internet radio, as you
drive, that offers you such channels as:
1) Educational and historical
information for the landmarks you are passing,
2) Highly local, up to
the minute news, politics, weather, and
traffic, 3) Reviews and
info on local restaurants, shopping specials,
and entertainment events, as you are passing
them. On the navigation and cell phone screen,
location-based advertisements can pop up
as clickable graphics, or audio headlines
in a radio stream, and if you click on them
you can hear ordinary or "breaking
ads," i.e., the big special going on
right now in the restaurant you are just
passing, for the next 20 customers that
wallk in the door. Over time, store owners
will be able to update their ads in realtime
from web interfaces, using their own automated
and manual systems ("Only two of these
left in stock, hurry!"). Such ads are
likely to create commercial and civic institution-driven
flash
mobs increasingly in coming years. When
you venture outside of your home zone, you
can set your filters to let you know interesting
tourist information, or when you pass a
favorite type of restaurant, bookstore,
coffeeshop, etc. For the radio shows, most
of this programming can be auto-assembled
digitally, without need of a radio DJ. Much
of the local video, as well as the less
changeable audio, might be updated daily
by Wi-Max to the auto while it is parked,
to be served up later as one drives through
the local area. In a more advertising-unobtrusive
mode, cell phone users and auto passengers
will be able to click on visual ads appearing
on their device's navigation screen, as
you approach a location, which will trigger
audio and video location-based advertising,
entertainment, and educational content.
Such ads will of course be able to hand
off GPS coordinates of the event back to
the device, which can then provide turn-by-turn
directions to the driver. Such a platform
will make weekend and evening "cruising"
of ones favorite areas of the city a much
more enjoyable experience for both tourists
and locals. One of the obvious longer-run
implications here is that within a decade,
satellite radio's national-level programming
(XM,
Sirius,
etc.) will be on the path to becoming a
niche player role in the radiosphere, the
way satellite television is beginning to
become a niche provider in the television
space. Another is that regulations will
have to be drafted for the use of ads and
video on navigation screens while the car
is in motion, so that driver-initiated accidents
don't increase. Handheld GPS devices, like
Garmin,
who have 50% of the U.S. handheld GPS market,
may be first with this service. But telcos
deploying smart cell phones are likely to
be the major provider, as with Sprint Nextel's
partnership with TeleNav
GPS Navigation Systems to provide turn-by-turn
GPS navigation for $10/month [65]. As a
final piece of this prediction, once the
telcos have built out the complex infrastructure
for superior entertainment and news content
based on voice subscriptions, and have trained
up millions in how to use their cell phones
and in-car navigation/cell radio systems
as mobile entertainment platforms, the market
will be ready to support open source versions
of this geographic web. Or perhaps the open
source versions will be competitive from
the very beginning. These are interesting
and uncertain issues for the future. |
|
• Internet
3D content feeds to the home. The coming
decade will bring an influx of both
independent film and machinima
(video animation rendered with virtual world
engines) to the home. Leading platforms
for amateur and independent video and machinima
publishing, like YouTube
and Google
Video are poised to greatly democratize
access to 3D visual stories, as soon as
these can be autosubcribed by our home media
systems. In 2005 Tivo
announced a deal
with Yahoo!
TV, allowing users of the latter service
to program their Tivo's through Yahoo's
interface. But what is needed to open up
this market would be allowing PVR users
to automatically download internet video
via RSS feeds, giving them keyword driven,
ad-minimized content to view at home each
evening, and an effectively infinite number
of independent TV channels. Perhaps a future
iTunes
hack will allow this. Windows Media Center
plug ins like Streamalicious
allow you to subscribe to YouTube, Google
Video, and other feeds with your computer,
so it can't be long before we see this in
our TVs as well. When videocasting equivalents
to OhMyNews
(Korea’s citizen-journalist newspaper)
begin to pay the best amateur content providers
for the right to display their work, an
explosion of amateur video content will
occur. As authoring tools for producing
machinima and recording public events within
3D worlds improve, and as leading virtual
worlds make these tools available to their
residents, we will see more 3D animation
downloaded to the home as well. The increasing
popularity of all-animation movies makes
it clear that discrimination between 3D
and film is blurring. "Good stories
not yet told" are becoming the primary
currency, and niche audiences are increasingly
accessible in the networked world. Netflix,
for example, pays premiums to independent
filmmakers for good social documentaries
to add to their 65,000 titles, and Netflix
customers rent as many as 40,000 of these
titles each week, diving deeply into the
long tail of content diversity. |
|
• Sony's
PS3 game console will lose market share
to the XBox
360 and possibly the Nintendo
Wii. Sony has made a major mistake focusing
on hardware superiority for the multicore
PS3, but not realizing that ease of game development
(tools and support) will be much more important
to the future of the new platform. Meanwhile
Microsoft's Xbox 360, a less impressive multicore
platform, is significantly easier to program
for, and Microsoft has been leveraging this
advantage by building a much better set of
game developer tools and support. The XBox
360 has also been faster to market, and perhaps
most importantly, has built an impressive
centralized online community, XBox
Live, not yet matched by Sony or Nintendo.
Live makes online extensions to standalone
games an easy addition for XBox developers,
and makes online access easy for players,
with a pay-once centralized system. If history
is any guide, the PS3's superior hardware,
if not matched by better partnership and support
of game developers and Live-quality community
features will be less impressive to gamers
than many in the media presently expect. Software
and story have always been more important
than hardware in PC games, even more so the
older PCs get. Hardware still plays a significant
differentiating role in the pre-consolidation
phase of the industry, as with consoles (Sony
PS3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii) and
portables (e.g., Sony
PSP, Nintendo
DS), but even here a case can be made
that hardware is becoming steadily less important. |
|
• Chat/IMing
will still be the killer app of the metaverse
in 2016 in the U.S.. We’ll see very
incremental change from the perspective of
user behavior. We’ll have richer 3D
smileys (oh the sarcasm!), but not much else
that has been uniformly adopted. Multicolored
discussion threads for different speakers.
Easier ability to filter our communities and
eject griefers. But basically the same general
user paradigm we see today. Why? Because much
of this is bandwidth limited, and the U.S.
will be dragging its heels just getting everyone
serious bandwidth over the next 10 years.
Fortunately this won't be true in other regions,
like Europe and Asia. Early innovation there
might cause a "Sputnik
effect" (reactive scientific and
technological advance) in the U.S., but it
is doubtful. |
|
• Virtual
worlds/MMOGs that enable and encourage user-created
content, ownership, and exchange will
become increasingly successful relative to
economically closed worlds. Korea is a bellweather
for this kind of content development. High
bandwidth penetration and social cohesion
have led to massive user-generated sites such
as Cyworld,
and Daum
(which purchased Lycos
in 2004). Citizen-journalist news services
like OhMyNews
are perhaps the best example of this new trend.
OhMyNews is now the 5th largest news company
in Korea, and the largest citizen-journalist
international news service, with its submissions
doubling every 3 months in 2006. OhMyNews
International is very likely to become a respected
international newswire like Reuters or AP.
They pay US $200 for lead stories, and $100
for section header stories. By the same token,
citizen-developer networks, aggregating the
best producers of interesting new spaces in
virtual worlds will be a highly valuable complement
to commercial ventures. |
|
• Underemployed
youth in emerging nations that offer low-cost
internet access (China, India, Costa Rica,
etc.) may be the most aggressive VW colonizers
and employees of virtual businesses, in the
coming decade. Information cascades/network
effects may drive large numbers of emerging
nations users to dominate particular sites,
the way Brazilians have become the main users
(65% in 2006) of Orkut,
a Google-developed social networking site. |
|
• Customized
avatar services growth. Some denizens of Second
Life make a good incomes taking digital
pictures of new residents and creating avatars
for them. There is even a (brave) startup
working on ways to insert the avatars of children
players into educational and entertainment
online games and worlds. In the future, we
can expect this to be a common feature of
most games. |
|
• Mirror
worlds (virtual worlds that are closely
tied to either physical space or the acquisition
of physical-world skills, like the geospatial
web and serious
games) will one day gain equal economic
strength to today's mostly fictional virtual
worlds. Unlike fantasy worlds, the information
learned in mirror worlds can be used in
both the virtual and the physical. Embedded
sensors and effectors, ubiquitous computing,
and augmented reality are all virtualizing
the physical world as well. Such trends
promise future mirror world platforms with
great economic value. Virtual worlds that
don’t correlate to the physical world
will, to a rough approximation only be able
to grow as large as the entertainment sector
of world society. But online social, educational,
training, shopping, entertainment, and collaboration
spaces that link directly and extensively
to real world physical locations promise
new social benefits. Modern large bookstores
have 45-55% of their sales in the nonfiction
category. Likewise we can expect tomorrow's
"nonfiction" games and virtual
educational platforms to grow to represent
at least parity in the virtual economy.
Today such games and systems are a small
minority in virtual space. |
|
• In 2016, management
interviews at some companies with extensive
online presence may include clan
and guild management questions for those
who spent extensive time as youth in virtual
worlds. What experiences did you learn managing
or working within a distributed group? What
was your financial, social, and other success?
What failures did you have and what did you
learn from them? |
|
• 3D travel management
systems. Trip planning platforms like GoogleMaps
and MapQuest
provide 2D overlays of driving directions.
Companies like Beat
the Traffic provide 3D traffic visualization
and "traffic forecasting" (travel
time forecasts and recommendations based on
historical traffic patterns). Being able to
preplan or display realtime traffic data for
a trip in 3D offers the superior situational
intelligence of seeing known physical locations,
potential side trips, rest stops, etc. Until
processing and bandwidth are much better,
2D versions of such systems will remain more
efficient for many years to come, however. |
|
• Non-GIS
2D+ and 3D visualization applications will
find a niche (example, TouchGraph,
The Brain,
MindManager,
etc.). For most users, such tools are likely
to continue to represent unnecessary complexity
and cognitive overhead, but a minority of
visually-oriented users find them useful
even today. In coming years, as it becomes
easier to add data sets into such frameworks,
and maintain persistent relationships between
objects, their niche value may grow. They
might become valuable, for some, for visualizing
social network relationships, teaching ontologies,
systems education, data archiving, etc. |
|
• Wi-Max
applications for the car. Wi-Max downloads
of podcasts from your home PC to your car,
as long as it is parked within a few miles
of your home, will ensure you always have
the latest audiobooks, music, etc. in the
car, where you have the free time to listen.
Driving directions looked up on your home
PC during trip planning will download to your
car navigation system with a click on your
way out the door. |
|
• 3G
wireless platforms for rich video will enable
persistent 3D access. High-end 3G communications
networks like Qualcomm's CDMA EV-DO
Revision B in the US, and DoCoMo’s
Foma
in Japan, in combination with new mobile
processors will provide platforms for mobile
always accessible 3D. ABI
Research analyst Ken Hyers predicts:
"Once the digital broadcast networks
come on board, you'll see 10 to 12 percent
of [U.S.] wireless customers signing up
by 2010," he said. They'll pay $10
to $15 a month for all-you-can-eat video.”
In addition to broadcast video, this platform
will also enable access to 3D social worlds,
and augmented reality infospaces. |
|
• Videoshopping,
an interactive 3D e-commerce application.
By 2016 live videoshopping (v-shopping) will
be available through a few of the larger retailers
in the most wired nations globally. Big Box
stores like Wal-Mart,
Home
Depot, and high end grocery chains will
eventually offer it, perhaps first as a fee-based
feature for shoppers desiring 3D video of
their product. Most obviously, online catalogs
will increasingly include prerecorded video
and 3D simulations where helpful. Some stores
will also offer live views of merchandise
on aisles from fixed aisle-mounted cameras,
allowing online local customers to videoshop
the store, and to remotely reserve store merchandise
for pickup or shipping. Some will offer a
dedicated attendant who can walk the aisles
for you with a wireless videophone, show you
the products (in stock and orderable), answer
questions about them, and reserves them for
pickup or shipping. Small independents will
also be able to walk their aisles with their
wireless videophones as their time permits,
as a courtesy for calling customers. In addition
to the prerequisite of mass consumer adoption
of high-quality home videophones and hands-free
wearable wireless videophones for merchants,
the main block to this vision is ubiquitous
100+ Mbps broadband. Given present leadership
history, countries like the U.S. are unlikely
to see significant videoshopping adoption
within this timeframe. |
|
• Incumbent media disadvantage:
Perhaps the biggest loser in the early metaverse
era may be other forms of media. The way newspapers
have lost ground to television, we can see
MMOs already stealing time from television
and physical gatherings, within early adopter
demographics. |
|
• A broad-based launcher/browser
for multiple virtual worlds may emerge within
the next 10 years. Multiverse
is one company presently working on delivering
this vision, giving small developers access
to an MMOG delivery network using a free-upfront,
revenue sharing model. Steam,
Valve’s proprietary content delivery
system, is a downloader/ patcher/ launcher
that allows continuous updating of virtual
worlds (Half Life, etc.). Making the browser/updater
platform truly background (Steam is invasive
in current implementation) is a present challenge. |
|
• Better virtual
workplaces by 2016. People presently doing
eLearning and eWorking are often only marginally
invested in today’s early online platforms,
as they are both unecessarily complex (too
much clicking around and waiting) and missing
many of the realtime social aspects of physical
space. Such systems need more social accountability.
If you don’t show up to the space, you
need to be missed, as you are in physical
space. If you are there, your presence needs
to affect others in a tangible way, not just
as an icon or name on the screen. In 2016
most of us will still be working most of the
time in physical workplaces away from home,
but we’ll see a lot of people coming
in to the physical office less than five days
a week. There will be an increasing number
of people who work mostly at home, and more
opportunities will exist for virtual community,
but this style of work still requires more
self motivation and direction than many workers
presently have, so even with its cost efficiencies
it will remain the minority of jobs. At the
same time, talented people don’t want
to be closely surveilled remotely, so highly
transparent virtual workplaces will remain
a distinct minority, at least in leading companies. |
|
• Virtual world bear
market ahead. Summit quote: "There may
be a coming crash in the virtual world market.
Does this not look like a bubble? I think
it's safe to say we'll see a shakeout at least.
Certainly the big game MMOs have gotten to
be too expensive.
World of Warcraft may be the last increase
in production budgets we see for a while.
The expenses are killing everyone. Easy money
is flowing in right now, but it's like the
tide. In 2-5 years it'll wash back out." |
|
• Virtual
world economies will become subject to financial
oversight organizations. As virtual worlds
become means for transferring funds from one
country another, government agencies will
want regulation. We can expect threshold transactions
requiring reporting, and other restrictions. |
|
• The metaverse
will accelerate the transition to a knowledge
economy (after Peter Drucker), where the
creativity of individuals and groups become
a much more important form of capital. |
|
• Portions
of the richly graphic background of concerts
can be increasingly be controlled by audience
members, both those online and those physically
present, through their cellphones. Increasing
numbers of musicians will be fully animated
themselves. Think Gorillaz. |
|
|
|
|
|
9C. Predictions - Social, Legal and Other
• The great promise of
the metaverse as a platform for rehabilitation
- the rise of the Symbiont
Network [76]. Socially marginalized groups
and individuals are those who presently stand
to gain the greatest benefit from interaction
in today's first generation online worlds
like Second
Life. Even the "cartoon versions"
of social interactions presently available
in such worlds can be greatly beneficial to
individuals who don't have even that level
of social normalcy and support available to
them. We are talking here about people living
in repressive cultures or social situations,
the poor and disenfranchised, those with social
phobias, mental illness, and criminal histories.
Imagine the power of these worlds to help
juvenile offenders while they are incarcerated,
by getting them into a virtual world and allowing
them to form healthy relationships, anonymous
or otherwise, with a larger community of online
do-gooders and role models, all supervised
lightly by a small staff of psychologists,
social workers and corrections professionals.
There are some great studies waiting to be
done here on whether having that kind of social
interaction and post-release support, especially
if it is persistent and ubiquitously available
(e.g., the ability to shout out at any time
to your support community of avatars through
your cellphone/PDA) would impact recidivism,
self esteem, ability to get and hold a job
after release, etc. I predict such "Symbiont
Networks" will have a profoundly empowering
effect.
|
|
• The next
10 years will see only small steps towards
a globally interoperable metaverse. Summit
quote: "We need baby steps because people
aren't ready. There's not going to be a collective
authority over and interoperability between
even the largest metaverse environments. For
example, China is going to do their own thing.
If you leave a world you will be able to take
the value of your virtual property by real-money
trading through third parties, but not
the things themselves." |
|
• The same
way computer games split between themed (most),
casual (many), and nondirective
(a few) games, virtual worlds may split between
worlds themed for entertainment, work, investment,
education, socialization and other purposes,
places for ritualized casual interactions
(chatrooms, etc.), and a few open-ended spaces
where anything may occur. |
|
• Social
and legal issues (individual and group attitudes,
behavior, and standards including hacker activity,
user adoption, policy, law), not technological
issues, will be the primary roadblocks to
metaverse development over the next ten years. |
|
• Realtime
fact
checking surge. By 2016, those with high-end
wearables and persistent wireless access to
good databases will be able to easily fact
check anything of interest throughout the
day and during conversations with their natural
language mobile devices. Some individuals
with access to fast web connections today
are already using such tools during business
and personal telephone conversations to gain
social and competitive advantages. |
|
• Networked
exercise, active video games (AVGs)/exergames,
and online gyms. As inexpensive videoconferencing
hits the home, people will use this shared
virtual space to conduct home exercise routines.
Imagine your yoga or aerobics instructor
leading a small group of clients, all showing
in split screen, through their paces, with
everyone seeing each other on the home video
wall. Active video games like Dance
Dance Revolution (DDR) are already used
for weight loss in some groups. Networked
home mats for the gym floor and cameras
will allow much more extensive versions
of such exergames in coming years. Picture
tomorrow's home exerciser networked in an
augmented reality fighting game (see Nintendo's
Wii). Home-based exercisers will be
able to enter virtual foot and bike races
against others in their city, on simulated
or videotaped terrains of real destinations,
using their networked home machines (treadmills,
bikes, ellipticals, climbers, and other
equipment). The leading gyms of 2016, in
the same way that they offer aerobics classes
today, may employ trainers who lead virtual
home workouts in conjunction with occasional
trips to the physical gym, and sponsor weekend
workouts and competitions that bring together
closely-matched virtual partners first found
in the virtual world. Climb the Matterhorn
(high-def actual video, overlaid with digital
avatars of the climbers). Run the Grand
Canyon. Bike Napa Valley. Meet new folks
in the process, and have an experience that
almost feels like you are there. Your online
coach/trainer/guide keeps track of your
improvement, and you are rewarded by the
environment, the social activities, the
game structure, and of course the exercise
itself. Imagine a networked DDR carpet that
can be rolled out over the entire living
room floor. With tomorrow’s eyetoy
descendants, people can be transported into
virtual space for danceoffs, they can use
their whole living room floor for the dance
area, and the best footage will be shared
globally overnight. Fun and empowering. |
|
• 3D authoring tools
will become usable by amateurs. This will
be necessary for user-annotated 3D worlds
to emerge. Google’s 2006 purchase of
SketchUp,
one of the easiest to use 3D authoring systems
available today, is a good example of this.
Free and widely adopted 3D creation tools
for children using laptops will be another
prerequisite. We see early examples of 3D
creation products aimed at childen in Takeo
Igarashi’s early Magical
Sketch 2 (2005). More advanced products,
like eFrontier's 2D Anime
Studio and 3D Poser
and Shade
(2006), are also bringing more artistically
oriented youth into the 3D authoring space |
|
• Taxation
in virtual worlds. "Eventually, there's
going to be a portfolio of these synthetic
currencies," says virtual space scholar
Edward Castronova. Journalist Daniel Terdiman
writes,
"cyberspace nations that are issuing
these currencies are going to be under legal
obligation to report sales and volumes and
transactions, because in worlds where those
currencies can be freely liquidated into dollars,
there are clear tax implications..."
[77,78]. |
|
• Virtual
world foyers on personal home pages
will emerge in some future call screening
systems. As standards emerge for shared
virtual spaces, and as avatar and VoIP telephony
improves, within ten years we may see the
proliferation of virtual foyers on the virtual
home pages used by tomorrow's youth. Some
people may prefer to look out from their
computer screen at an avatar knocking on
their virtual door as their favorite way
to screen their potential realtime voice
conversations. For those using such systems,
one of the default views on our monitors
will be looking out through the front door
of our "virtual house." In addition
to emailing, IMing or calling, any individual
will be able to walk up to our virtual house
and knock on the door. We'll be able to
see the public face and online profile of
who is knocking, what they want to talk
about, and decide if we want to open the
door. Once opened, we may have a text or
voice, video or avatar conversation, per
our preference. More intimate friends will
get higher bandwidth. If we decide not to
answer and a verbal message is left by the
caller, being able to scan the autotranslated
text of a voicemail, in half the time it
would have taken to listen to it, will further
increase our efficiency, but with downsides
as well, including growing social isolation
and alienation from natural human contact.
The temptation to be a hikikomori
must be guarded against in our increasingly
electronically insulated culture. |
|
• Shared
wireless data structures. In the same way
Palm pioneered
the infrared beaming of virtual business cards
in 2000 using mobile devices, we can forsee
a future set of standard data structures for
wireless local proximity social networking
(home page address, vCards, Linked In contacts,
etc.) and feeds (newsletters, blog subscriptions,
podcast and video links) shared one to one
and one to many at meetings, conventions,
etc. RSS output of text, audio, and video
data types should be detectable as local transmissions,
identifiable by source, and available as a
one click subscription option. |
|
• Presence
management and continuous
partial attention will both improve. Two
parent incomes, flextime, home offices, and
the array of digital media and communications
options available to us have created a new
social ecosystem. People with too much access
(IM, cellphone, texting) to them already don’t
get enough work done. There will be an increasing
need for fine grained presence management
and for the ability for webcams to automatically
detect our presence, ask if we want to be
available, and indicate our status to the
outside world. |
|
• LARP. or
Live
Action Roleplaying, will be enabled by
geospatial and augmented reality (AR) technologies.
Having the computing environment increasingly
able to keep track of rules and performance
frees to the players to make complex choices
in physical space. Sony’s Eye
of Judgment EyeToy augmented reality card
game is a modest early version of this, monitoring
the user's card motions in physical space.
Guild members in World
of Warcraft gain social and management
skills, and one can expect even more of this
in AR LARPs that occur in physical space.
A mature LARP market will include not just
today's fiction games, but general educational
games and "serious" training games
in such fields as security, investigation,
business, etc. Also expect updated, augmented
reality versions of well-known classics like
Monopoly
or Chutes
and Ladders. |
|
• The
adult entertainment sector of the 3D web
community will be increasingly differentiated
in 2016. We'll see some unusual new products
and behaviors among the user community,
like avatar swapping, virtual
sex machines, and functional teledildonics.
Summit quote: "We'll see much more
virtual sex, mutivestites, and the "skankification"
of American youth. That would be defined
as having less sex but being more obsessed
with it – skanky but not really getting
laid." |
|
• Preservation of privacy
but the end of anonymity [the inability to
track an online user, even given a compelling
social need]. "Human societies rely so
much on reputation for their basic functioning
that online anonymity seems unlikely to persist
in any significant way." -- Edward Castronova
[1]. |
|
• Virtual
currencies, increasingly understood as
real stores of value, will be regulated within
countries by the same rules that govern existing
foreign exchange markets. The first politically
stable synthetic worlds whose robust virtual
economies are connected to physical world
capital exchanges are likely to enjoy a significant
first mover capital influx, similar to that
seen in the developing markets of emerging
nations. |
|
•
The
Valuecosm. Some time after 2015 (the expected
emergence of a functional Conversational
Interface), it will be easy to construct
automated preference and values maps of all
consenting metaverse users, simply by archiving
their public conversations with the system.
This data, when combined with mirror world
models of physical space, will allow the emergence
of the Valuecosm, an environment where powerful
economic, environmental, and political actors
will regularly check with the public values
maps of a geographic or virtual community
before taking any major action (new store,
new laws, etc.) within it. Likewise, individuals
seeking to find geographic and virtual communities
of shared values (including cognitive diversity)
will be able to co-locate in neighborhoods,
both physical and virtual, with others of
similar mind. The Valuecosm, and the automated
preference expression tools that will emerge
around it (voting, boycotting, information
filters, other social action systems) will
greatly empower individual actors relative
to today's most powerful actors. They will
also enable the discovery of new positive
sum strategies and processes that would be
likely to be desired by members of both geographic
and virtual social networks. Personal and
neighborhood diversity will likely increase
substantially due to the Valuecosm's effect,
with meaningful cultural differences being
maintained, neighborhood by neighborhood in
physical and virtual space, while global rights
and entitlements become more standardized.
For an outline of the Valuecosm concept and
a visualization of it operating in the longer
term future, see "The
Valuecosm" in "Human
Performance Enhancement in 2032,"
John Smart, 2005. |
|
• Legal
issues will take years to play out because
of the speed of the system. Summit quote:
"If litigation started tomorrow on
any major metaverse issue, it wouldn't be
settled for several years. So I think in
5 years will be struggling with the same
questions. By 2016 virtual intellectual
property law will be better than today but
still a work in progress. How do we get
there? Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits. DRM
will be well crafted for business, and fair
use will invove more than we had in the
pre-digital age but still be circumscribed,
the way Apple's
iTunes today has a "7-burn
limit" on playlists We'll still
see privacy but a lot less anonymity. Digital
shredding of certain messages after reading
will be supported but rarely used. There
will still be “offshore” facilities
for storing private data but few who use
them, as the penalties will be much stiffer
for those who encrypt while breaking the
law vs. those who simply break the law.
While serious felonies may not be worse
than today, with regard to misdemeanors,
the gap between our legal system and what
people are actually doing will likely stay
the same or grow larger rather than smaller. |
|
• The force of the bonds
formed in virtual worlds is strong enough
to keep these communities together if a world
closes. There are historical examples of that.
So you will continue to have communities traveling
together from world to world as some of them
wink out. |
|
• Much of
the money coming into the metaverse won't
be spent wisely. Summit quote: "You're
starting to see money pay attention to this
space. It won't be spent wisely. But it never
is. Look at Web
2.0. There's 20+ companies in every category
and if all of them are banking on an exit
to Yahoo, Google, or MS, there are gonna be
a lot of losers." |
|
• The metaverse tipping
point will occur with the delivery of
free, interesting, community-created content,
like we see in YouTube
or MySpace.
Social networks will migrate into virtual
worlds as soon as it becomes feasible. Summit
quote: "You have millions of people treading
water in MySpace waiting for a virtual space
where they can do more, have a heightened
level of interaction. That VW doesn't exist
now. SL doesn't do it as well as a flat social
space on the web." Summit quote: "Metaverse
entertainment will take off when it looks
good, is cheap, and you don't have to pay
$20 for parking." |
|
• Summit
quote: "In the future, everyone becomes
a destination." This is a nice extension
of the 1991 observation of the Scottish artist
Momus, "In
the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen
people." The more fractionated our
tastes get, and the better the web becomes
at connecting us to others with similar tastes,
the more we all become each other's microcelebrities.
Summit quote: "I think the key idea of
the metaverse is a communication space. Think
of SL as a node, like the AOL of the net.
What's going to happen is that everyone becomes
a living, 3D web page. I want to be a place
that you want to go to." |
|
• Contrary to the prediction
that the metaverse will encourage social unity,
Institute for
the Future expects people will hold more
tightly to their beliefs and at least in the
short to medium run there may be more ideological
polarization and conflict. The metaverse will
not prevent "bad globalization."
For better or worse, people will be able to
connect with others with strongly similar
likes and viewpoints, and insulate themselves
from those with dissenting perspectives, even
more than they do today. When VoIP
(Skype, etc.) started, people would just talk
to strangers comparing rigs because that is
where the tech was – now it works like
telephone, a tool to talk almost exclusively
to people you know. MMOs already show a strong
predisposition to affiliating with already
known groups, rather than strangers. 10 years
out from now, the current sociability we see
in virtual spaces might just be an artifact
of their present immaturity. Most of tommorrow's
MMOs may be places for interacting with only
those who you chose intentionally, versus
someone you meet "in public." At
least the use of avatars may encourage more
diversity in age, social classes, gender and
other non-ideological factors than we otherwise
would. |
|
• The
next generation that grows up with the persistent
mobile internet will have very different
cultural concepts and social norms. In general,
they'll be significantly more informal and
transparent and collaborative than we've
seen to date. Expect a lot more pajamas
in public. |
|
• We'll start to see
more and different versions of virtual worlds
popping up at a greater rate than we have
seen the past 10 years. The metaverse Cambrian
Explosion is near. You're going to see
people chasing these pots of gold and trying
to create killer open ended and specialty
virtual worlds. Second Life may already have
enough momentum to remain a generalist leader,
but there's plenty of room for more non-fantasy
specialty worlds. |
|
• The
major parties may have virtual campaign
HQ's in Second Life in 2008. A famous politician
(2008?) will make a campaign stop in a virtual
world. At least one city politician has
set
up virtual campaign headquarters there
(2006). |
|
• Fantasies
will continue to be tied to leading real
world locations. There will be multiple
high-res virtual iterations of New
York and other leading cities in cyberspace,
as people want to be tycoons, stars, laureates,
or social butterflies in the most interesting
places. |
|
• By 2015
at least one significant new
metaverse-based religious group will emerge.
This won't just be an online variant of an
existing physical world religion but a new
faith that practices regular spiritual activities
first in virtual space, and later and less
centrally in physical space.
|
|
•
Today's synthetic worlds, where the user views
themself as "external" to the virtual
world, may be seen in hindsight as intermediate
environments, forerunners of virtual space
as a persistent, intimate visual and linguistic
representation of the user's mental and emotional
state. In other worlds, one's local virtual
environment may become as personal as one's
house, and as intimate as one's clothes [2] |
|
|
|
10.
Positive (Opportunity) and Mixed (Alternative)
Scenarios. Positive or mixed vignettes
about the future of 3D web related technologies.
10A. Positive and Mixed Scenarios - Technology
and Science
•
Gmail 2016, lifelogs,
friendfinder, and the talent marketplace.
Every Google
Gmail or other mass-storage online email
user today, and any email user who currently
archives their past emails, is a blogger who
doesn't know it. They are preserving for posterity
a text-based record, or lifelog, of all their
written memes, the topics and ideas they care
about. Such lifelogs will continue to incorporate
increasing numbers of data categories (audio,
pictures, video, websites surfed, places visited
with your GPS phone, etc.). Flock,
a Web2.0 browser, is developing a lifelog
of all previous websites visited, and using
this as a basis for context-sensitive internet
search queries initiated by the user, displayed
preferentially at the top of the list in the
manner of Google
Desktop. Since the Gmail's 2004 advent,
Google
has been steadily upgrading the storage available
to every user, with 2.6Gb available per user
as of June 2006. Within the next ten years,
as the participatory web emerges, Google can
be expected to introduce a suite of permission-based,
database-backed collaboration tools to mine
this data, tools that that will be accessible
to any user who consents to the indexing of
their database, without revealing its particular
contents, and the spidering of their online
publications. These tools will give users
profound new abilities to meet others based
on their search criteria, and to find global
online talent ideal for their virtual or physical
enterprises. In addition to early abuse, tremendous
new positive-sum economic, political, and
social interactions can be expected to occur. |
|
•
Nanoscale simulation. Modeling can give
new intuition with regard to how physical
properties operate at small scales. This
is important because miniaturization has
been a massive driver of accelerating change
for the last century. Subtle forces (eg,Van
der Waals) become important at the nanoscale,
and a subset of properties and ratios (eg,
surface
area to volume ratio) become very prominent.
Being able to play with reasonably high
fidelity physics models at this scale will
allow designers to discover and develop
intuitions for stunning new miniaturization
and manufacturing efficiencies in the way
that today’s equations and noninteractive
2D models don’t allow. Much of this
will come from bionics/biomimicry
(modeling how properties work in biological
nanosystems and applying them in technological
systems) but much will also come from experimentation
with the special properties of the micro
and nanocosms. |
|
•
3D captures 2D, with no appreciable performance
loss. With sufficient hardware capacity, todays
online 3D worlds will subsume the browser
world, perhaps running as emulations
on virtual
machines. This is beginning to happen
with browsers in virtual worlds like Second
Life and There, geo browsers like Google Earth,
and the Opera browser planned for the Nintendo
Wii. This development would make it so
those who spend many hours in 3D wouldn't
have to leave in order to get access to all
their normal 2D web experiences, which would
make 3D even more immersive and sticky. Of
course this will require sufficient local
processing and bandwidth for there to be no
significant performance loss to be running
an immersive 3D world simultaneous to intensive
2D tasks. At the present time, a significant
performance cost might be noticed by most
users running the emulation. |
|
•
Internet television, independent video, and
the democratization of information. Besides
the coming long-awaited ability to download
video
RSS feeds from the net to your home PVR,
a technical advance that, combined with
fiber to the home (FTTH), should be a
national right for the 21st century citizen,
another key enabling technology will be the
OLED tablet remote. Picture having up to to
100 video channels/items/games, etc. displayed
in thumbnail on the top level of a lightweight
tablet/TV remote on your lap. Tap any one
and you get 100 more like on the next level
down. That's (100)^5 or ten billion visual
items within five taps of your finger.
That's a categorization system we could use.
Using a favorites filter, your top level will
be your 100 favorite video channels. For many
viewers, 80% of these might be IPTV narrowcasts,
many from independent sites, and only 20%
would be network broadcasts, a significant
advance beyond cable for democratization of
the media. Click under any video and you get
up to 100 other videos with similar features,
all competing to make it up to the next directory
level, based on your and others ratings and
viewing habits. As you watch a movie or play
a game, "more information" links,
clips, related vids/sims, are generated. Such
a platform would greatly improve our access
to quality information. Here is a promising
scenario for Democracy 2016: Imagine watching
a political campaign speech or State
of the Union address, relegated it to
a corner of your large screen display with
the sound turned off (closed captioned). As
the politician makes his claims you can see
immediately, on the right hand side, analysis
from your favorite respected NGOs feeds, like
the Center
for Public Integrity, evaluating media
content for factual accuracy, bias, spin,
etc. Such tools might even lead to a resurgence
of citizen political involvement. Certainly
today's blogs and proliferating independent
video are promising early steps in that direction. |
|
•
SLooglebox (Second Life/Google/Xbox-style
convergence of web and console platforms):
Next-gen console systems are no-longer stand-alone
gaming devices, but powerfully networked computers
geared towards gaming but capable of running
any web app. Parallelized hardware like the
Xbox
360 (3 3.2 Ghz processors) and the PS3
(8 Cell processors) should eventually be able
to deliver the advanced features we are going
to need in 3D web collaboration in coming
years. An affilate player like Apple
might also be the first to create the open-standards
supercomputer-in-a-box that woudl function
not just as a game device or home media device
but also as a tool for online networking and
collaboration through persistent online worlds. |
|
•
The Display
Table (aka Game Table,
etc.). This is a new social interaction
device that seems like an inevitable addition
to kitchen of every home. Remember that
scene in Total Recall or Running
Man (or one of those Schwarznegger
sci-fi movies) where he talks to his parents
through an adjacent video wall while at
the breakfast table. The Display Table takes
that concept one step further by recognizing
that our tables themselves will soon be
both cheap and smart enough to display graphics,
and track physical objects (our fingers,
etc.) moved on its surface. Think of the
mulit-touch interface of Microsoft
Surface (pictured here, interacting
with Zunes) but without the under-table
projection technology and delivered at an
affordable price. The affordable (under
$1,000) Game Table will likely need at least
the following to become an overnight success
in the homes of the 2010's and 2020's: 1)
a horizontal touchscreen display (OLED?)
as the table surface, with a computer hidden
under the table and a wire going to power
and internet 2) slimline
under-table slideout wireless keyboards
and game controllers/wands for the users,
3) flatscreen wall displays
(on at least one and ideally two adjacent
walls) that are wire-networked to the table,
and 4) optional individual
wearable AR displays (either small personal
screens at the table edge or wearable eyeglasses)
that will display personalized, secretive
information to each user/player. The table
will track physical game pieces and cards
that are placed on the table surface for
games and group collaborative/work activities.
Wall and ceiling-mounted EyeToy-type cameras
and wireless surround speakers would be
additional options. The R&D departments
of several major companies (Mitsubishi,
Toshiba, and Microsoft among others) are
working on game table prototypes. Mitsubishi's
DiamondTouch
table is an innovative (but still early)
example in this space. DiamondTouch users
sit on conductive seat pads, so that each
individual user's touching of the table
is identified by capacitive coupling. Stanford's
Terry Winograd and colleagues explore the
potential of such tables for group dynamics
in a 2006 IEEE
paper, which outlines such motivating
educational (serious) games as MatchingTable
and ClassificationTable. Such a table would
not only be a preferred space for videoconferencing
and other work activities, it would be a
major new entertainment device and social
enabler, bringing casual and MMO gaming
to the main social room (kitchen or living
room) in the household, classroom, and conference
room. For home use, it would be a platform
on which many of the classic family games
(Monopoly,
Life,
Risk,
etc.) will clearly be reinvented, as well
as a conduit for a constellation of fascinating
new family and participatory educational
games. Affordable OLED
displays for the table and the flatscreen
on the adjacent wall may be an enabling
technology that will create acceptable table
portability and performance. Look for the
first very high end versions of this some
time after 2008 (five years? eight?), with
mass market versions to follow a few years
later. Game Tables that are lower to the
ground, like coffeetables, also seem inevitable
for the living room environment, and would
be a central peripheral to accompany wireless
game controllers in the living room, hiding
the console in the coffee table. Nevertheless,
sitting in hard chairs in the kitchen, at
school, or at work, with good lighting,
near the refrigerator, seems like it may
become another very popular configuration
for extended multiperson table-based gaming
in coming years, creating a permanent new
set of social dynamics, opportunities, and
challenges that need to be considered. Social
psychologists, are you game?
|
|
|
|
10B. Positive and Mixed Scenarios - Business
and Economics
•
Mixed reality cardgames and boardgames. Sony
will be launching their innovative new Eye
of Judgment (EOJ) mixed reality card game
in 2007 for the PS3. EOJ is a card game you
play under an EyeToy in front of a television,
and the cards you lay down project animated
characters onto the screen in front of you.
The EyeToy recognizes the cards via a visual
"cybercode." This should be a hit
with kids who already play intricate card-based
strategy games like Magic:
the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh.
It is hard to keep track of all the rules
of play in such games, and also to dramatically
tell the story that the card battles represent.
Mixed reality allows visual drama to be inserted
easily, and the computer keeps track of the
rules and points. As collectibles, cardgames
have tremendous market appeal (Wizards
of the Coast, the company behind Magic:
the Gathering, used the popularity of this
franchise revenue to buy a number of older
gaming companies, like TSR
(D&D) , and gaming retail chains like
Game Keeper. Cards also concretely present
you with a continual set of varying decision
options (your “hand”) and potential
strategies, so they are an interesting way
to build decisionmaking skills. All kinds
of traditional games (Poker, solitaire, etc.)
can be enhanced by this augmented reality
format. Picture playing a game like chess,
monopoly, risk, or any other card or boardgame
this way. One gets the huge satisfaction of
manipulating physical objects on the board,
and the satisfaction of seeing the consequences
of one’s actions in a 3D space projected
onto the walls around you. Mixed reality games
like this will be a great application for
tomorrow's game table. First generation versions,
however, if they are not both lag-free, bug-free,
and intuitive, may not live up to designers
expectations. |
|
•
Nonfiction gamebooks. In the 1990's almost
all MMOGs had medieval themes, based on fantasies
of the past. With the turn of the century
we saw the first good fantasies of the present,
like The
Sims Online (2002), and of alternative
futures, like City
of Heroes (2004). Considering games as
an analog to books, starting out with medieval
fantasies made sense, as fiction is the largest
category seller, and romance (with conflict,
courtship, pursuit, and resolution) and mystery
and suspense (another theme well represented
in medieval environments) are the best selling
categories in fictional media (books, film).
Yet while 53 percent of the American populace
reads fiction on occasion, 43 percent of us
also read nonfiction (Publisher's
Weekly). Games that attempt to educate
by recreating fragments of reality, "nonfiction
games," also called serious
games, were scarce in gamespace until
the early 2010's, when three of the largest
publishing houses (Random House, HarperCollins,
and TimeWarner) began releasing "gamebook"
worlds in conjunction with their top selling
nonfiction titles. While limited in scope,
these worlds had competition, mystery, and
suspense as elements, in addition to the possibility
of social interaction among the players, and
were designed to teach the inhabitants the
basic paradigms of the book through experiential
learning. The addition of monetary prizes
and social acclaim to those who successfully
navigated levels/chapters greatly increased
the gamebook's appeal over traditional audiobooks,
print books, and even linear videos. By 2016,
nonfiction games (gamebooks and other e-learning
environments) had become 15% of the total
gaming market, and were projected to keep
growing relative to the saturating market
for fiction games, up to a projected 40% share,
the same share nonfiction holds in the trade
book market. |
|
• Augmented reality matchmaking/dating
and business/professional networking service.
Picture two people walking in close proximity
in physical space. Their portable digital
devices buzz, and alert them to the other.
They've been identified as a potential match
as both subscribe to the same federation of
online
dating services. This match already includes
a rating of physical attractiveness, using
collaborative
filtering judgements, so there would be
reasonable consistency between one's stated
preference level and one's subjective experience
of potential matches (e.g., few "surprises").
Each person was cleared originally with some
kind of background check. They can immediately
download info about the other by setting security
level to 3 and reading one another’s
data. One might approach the other and ask
if they'd like to get a quick coffee. Depending
on the frequency of these kinds of alerts
(the pickiness of your settings) this might
be a welcome spontaneous interruption to your
day. Such systems would also strongly reinforce
flocking behavior in cities, providing another
advantage to high density public spaces. Now
imagine the entire scenario again in a business/professional
networking context (LinkedIn,
etc.). Maximizing opportunities for face to
face interaction for purposes you select. |
|
• Virtually-aided K-6
schools in 2016. In 2004 a group affiliated
with Michael
Milken, 80’s junk bond king and
educational futurist, purchased KinderCare,
the nation’s leading child care chain.
Milken envisions a ten year future where private
preschools, using the latest developmental
psychology-based pedagogy, become highly networked
with working parents, who each pay $150/week
for their child’s attendance, even today
sometimes beginning in the first months of
life. In a digitally-enabled future, a working
parent in 2016 might watch and be able to
participate in a videoconference feed of their
three year old daughter attaining some developmental
milestone. Day care centers might capture
highlights of the day and send them to parents,
for viewing on their portable devices. At
the same time, virtual worlds may increasingly
be used for child education in such environments,
even as early as Kindergarten. Many of the
advantages of complex social interaction would
emerge by connecting smaller schools to the
larger community. With increasing transparency
of in-class activities we might also expect
less of the physical bullying that occurs
today, and is a particular problem in some
conformist cultures, like Japan. As education
is a market representing 9% of the U.S. GDP,
second in size only to health care, we’ll
surely see new virtual initiatives in this
space. |
|
• Mass collaboration
projects. Imagine a twenty-something with
good communication skills in 2010 running
a virtual
company of 1,000,000 volunteers, all working
on the same project. The company's output,
the thing they are all constructing together,
can be visualized in its developmental stages
by everyone in virtual space. It's an edifice
even more ambitious, in its own way, than
the great pyramids were. But this time it's
in everyone's self interest to see it emerge.
How many collaborative companies might emerge
like this? How many such projects are waiting
to be proposed? Wikipedia
is clearly one, but we can imagine many others.
GIS will soon allow whole communities to build,
use, and rate GIS-driven "CoolMaps"
of their environment. As micropayment
systems mature, the better models will pay
the developesr a microfraction of the revenues
received by the platform, based on their individual
efforts in its development. Human resources
software that monitors each team members weekly
contribution will also greatly facilitate
collaborative efforts, by preventing free
rider problems. Semi-automated systems
that educate and remind the group on the simple
collaboration rules will be key to building
the participatory web. |
|
• Online
speed
dating. This is an obvious development
we can expect in the big cities in a few years.
For all those who grow up using avatars in
their IM communications, it might start with
people voice chatting with each other through
their avatars, getting filtered rapidly into
different social groups based on their responses
and choices. As people show emotions to their
desktops/laptops/gauntlets/cellphones, the
camera maps those emotions right onto their
avatars. A list of your favorite contacts
would always be open on the right margin of
the screen. Once you've reached a certain
level of comfort with prospective partners,
you would allow a two way videoconference.
Tools like this could become a huge social
phenomenon mediating hookups in the metropolis. |
|
• Intimate
e-greeting card, circa 2015. Your lover
sends you a customized gamespace, you walk
your avatar to the transport door, suddenly
you are transported to a lush jungle, look
down and see you are only covered by a small
leaf skirt. Look up and see her similarly
scantily clad, laughing and running off behind
a waterfall. You chase her through the jungle,
beginning to understand the nature of the
game... |
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• New virtual
tools for globalizing
health care. We'll certainly see advances
in remote health monitoring tools and software,
and remote diagnostics for improving the domestic
doctor-patient relationship. But one of the
great promises of remote diagnostics will
be the ability of HMOs, or enterprising private
companies, to employ expert but low-wage physicians
in developing countries (India, China) for
24/7 consultation by families. Assuming the
liability issues can be negotiated, we may
see this first in general practice (pediatrics,
family physicians) but can also imagine its
value for specialty care (sports medicine,
dieticians, rehab medicine, gerontology, psychiatry,
etc.). Furthermore, since the metaverse will
allow for more transparent monitoring of individual
and group behavior, there will be significant
new opportunities for globalized, low cost
online therapy and psychological support.
The use of exergames/active video games may
also be prescribed by physicians as another
way to monitor and improve the patient's health
status. |
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• AR goggles for touring
historical sites. As augmented reality interfaces
drop in price and size, and increase in quality,
visitors to historic sites will increasingly
opt to use more immersive and interactive
AR goggle technology to mediate their experiences
as tourists. Building upon prototypes developed
by groups such as Geneva-based Miralab,
goggles will allow additional layers of text,
imagery, audio, and video to augment reality.
Tourists at Machu
Picchu wandering the ruins might come
across a 3D simulation of an Incan religious
ceremony, or a group of Incan kids playing
in a house courtyard in the 1400's. |
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10C. Positive and Mixed Scenarios - Social,
Legal and Other
•
Socializing presently marginalized
groups. Even though today's virtual worlds
are only caricatures of physical world social
interaction, still missing such basic elements
as facial expression (very useful in new encounters),
even these caricatures offer a major improvement
for those whose social interaction is presently
marginalized in some fashion. Thus groups
that could benefit early and disproportionately
from the still-primitive virtual worlds of
the 00's include the disabled/differently
abled, the socially phobic (Asperger's, etc.),
precocious youth (often socially marginalized),
the elderly (often isolated), economically
or culturally disadvantaged (globally and
locally), prisoners, and the mentally ill. |
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• Symbiont
groups/Symbiont
networks. Within ten years, some younger
users of synthetic worlds will form diverse
"symbiont groups." Their contributions
to group goals will be managed and mediated
by virtual team building e-learning platforms,
ensuring active and balanced contribution
by everyone in the group. Such groups will
likely be self limited by cognitive and communication
constraints to an intimate tablesetting size
(the most intimate group) of 3-8, and a Dunbar
number (total group size) of 150. These
kids will be lifelogging, sharing experiences,
communicating in realtime, giving each other
practical advice in realtime through an audio
backchannel, and sending output through their
wearcams. They will be able to be guided by
the self-designated "experts" in
the group as they attempt anything complex
(cooking a souffle, solving a math problem,
applying for a job, etc.). Many will experience
a kind of groupmind. "If it happens to
my group it happens to me." Such individuals
will follow a measurably different developmental
path than less networked youth not participating
in such groups. By 2016 some early studies
will show that, as in leading World of Warcraft
guilds today, youth who are members of symbiont
clans that possess widely diverse skill sets
yet share common values are more generally
intelligent, resilient, economically productive,
and better adapted than those who don't form
symbionts at an early age. A "symbiont
gap" will be noted between those (comparably
few, at first) children who link up in this
fashion and those who consider it alien or
an unacceptable loss of individual identity.
There will be significant controversy on this
issue among developmental psychologists and
the general public, in both developed and
emerging nations. " Picture in 2011 a
pilot correctional
program taking juvenile (and later, adult)
lawbreakers and bringing them into virtual
worlds while they are incarcerated. These
worlds are populated with a few social workers,
psychologists, and corrections officers, but
mostly with volunteer do-gooders, whose physical
world identities are private in the virtual
world. On release, the juvenile is still able
to maintain permanent ongoing contact with
his virtual community. He gets advice through
his earpiece 24/7 from any of his friends
in world, on such mundane things as getting
a job, interacting with others, etc. He can
have this advice spoken into an earpiece,
and the virtual community can see his physical
world feed, seeing what he sees. Now imagine
that recidivism rates have dropped drastically
for various types of crimes in the pilot study,
and there are efforts to expand it to other
groups. Pilot programs for adult offenders,
homeless, and subgroups of the mentally ill
begin to show simiilar benefits. Why do these
work so well? Here's the basic dynamic: There
is a great majority of untapped volunteer
help in any healthy community, a statiscially
small number of individuals needing major
help, and rapidly increasing network between
them. |
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• Virtual platforms
for physical and virtual community planning
and management. A new level of collaborative
community planning and management will occur,
stimulated by new virtual tools. Planning
interest has waxed and waned periodically
over the twentieth century, beginning with
the British social thinker Ebenezer Howard's
Garden
Cities of Tomorrow, 1902, which
became influential in the U.S. in the Garden
Cities urban planning movement of the
late 1920's, again in the late 1930's (1939
New York World's Fair, Greenbelt
Towns, Broadacre City), in the New
Towns program in the 1960's, and in
the slow increase in regional community
planning initiatives in the decades
since. After exploration of massive structural
alternatives in public housing and transportation,
urban cities, whether in suburbs or a revitalized,
high-density cure, are seeking structures
with "people scale," allowing
promenades, community resources, walking,
and public transportation. Safety, sustainability,
and to a lesser extent, innovation values
are also growing steadily, as are efforts
to increase the diversity of themes and
neighborhoods within each municipality.
Virtual worlds can help in the collaborative
envisioning of idealizations of these values,
and measure the progress toward them annually.
Imagine a virtual model of a large city
that, with webcam input, could quantify
the distribution of graffiti
throughout the community. Efforts to
reduce unwanted graffiti, and to provide
an adequate number of protected public art
expression zones in every area of the community
could be measured and modeled in the virtual
city model by every planner and citizen.
Many other such insights and collaborations
could be managed by making these models
and the data behind them available for public
use. |
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• A powerful new pastime
of elderly in 2016: building virtual
scrapbooks. Once we are running even first
generation lifelogs
and conversational
interfaces, such tools can be used to
great effect to collect the "stories
of our elders," and begin the process
of virtual recreation of their past lives,
all well before they pass on. Building this
virtual scrapbook and using it for reminiscing
will be an immensely rewarding experience
for the ellderly. Improving it will be a major
pastime for them, aided by a new profession
of health care assistants who are "reminiscence
workers," able help them navigate these
powerful virtual world/TV/computer tools,
to build out geneaology
networks, etc. The smarter their "digital
twins" (avatar
versions of themselves) get, the more their
values, personalities, and stories will all
be captured in the virtual world, and the
more such worlds can be used as intelligence
aids and grieving substitutes by loved ones
left behind when our elders pass away. The
capabilities of this cyberimmortality
will only grow exponentially with each passing
year. Some subcultures, such as futurists,
early tech adopters, and transhumanists will
start to see it as a seriously important social
value before this decade is out. |
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• While most flash
mobs in coming years may be for commercial
events (concerts, shopping specials, etc.)
we can also imagine them being used increasingly
for social activism, as virtual world use
increases. After a particularly galvanizing
public event, political protests and acts
of calculated civil disobedience (sit-ins
on freeways, etc.) might be greatly increased
in coming years, all directed via virtual
world platforms. This virtual connectivity
would bring us closer to Howard
Rheingold's vision of the increasing collective
intelligence available to highly networked
individuals, as outlined in his 2002 book,
Smart
Mobs [79]. |
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• Script-based
bots as attention mediators.There will be
increasing situations where we can send
our script bot to do something instead of
ourselves, and monitor and train our bot's
behavior from the background, while we are
doing other things. Your bot will increasingly
be able to monitor things for you and allow
you to drop into "full representation
mode" as needed. At some point people
may not be able to tell, in brief encounters,
whether the bot is parroting canned sentenes
or the person the bot represents is actually
typing a response. Software with prerecorded
responses for your cellphone (“I’m
in a meeting”, “I’m on
a plane”, “Don’t call
me, I’ll call you” etc.) already
exists. Context sensitivity for our bot-secretaries
will continue to improve. People will be
able to use this software to amplify their
existing tendencies. Those that want close
connectivity and productivity with a special
group will be able to have more of that.
Those that want increasing cocooning and
more barriers to social interaction will
have more of that. On balance, most people
are very likely to become even more casual
with their interactions with each other,
giving up more of their personal initiative
to the infrastructure. Many may become less
patient, particularly when asked to do potentially
automatable tasks. Engaging people to talk
about many types of simple scheduling, for
example, will increasingly be viewed as
a waste of time. Some of the disadvantages
of these systems may be increasing alienation
from the wider world, loss of empathy and
less motivation for collective action. Some
of the advantages will be increasing efficiency,
productivity, selectivity, and potential
new intimacy for small group interaction. |
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• Performance art and
collaborative art can explore new forms in
virtual space. In the same way such instruments
as the piano, the guitar, and the computer
each fundamentally changed the way music was
made, virtual space in this generation is
changing the possibilities for artistic expression.
Even with today’s primitive tools art
has become a major driver of creativity in
virtual spaces. The Burning
Life celebration that appears in Second
Life each year, a virtual counterpart to Burning
Man, has even more outlandish structures
than can be found in the physical world version. |
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• Educational
innovations: 1) Interactive whiteboards
for student interaction with 2D and 3D content.
Take a look at the stunning interactive
whiteboards of the UK educational innovator
Promethean.
Now extrapolate these out to 2016, only
bigger, cheaper, and with even higher resolution
and brightness. 2) Picture a classroom of
U.S. high school students being able to
go to the Forbidden
City in Beijing and learn its cultural
significance, both from a Chinese teacher
and a class of Chinese schoolchildren. Then
picture the Chinese classroom going to a
virtual Plymouth
Rock and learning its cultural significance
from their peers. The social dimension,
peer networks, and personal interpretations
of cultural data can now be conveyed with
classroom learning experiences. 3) Knowledge
management software will emerge to test
our recall of educational simulations for
high-stakes learning (test preparation,
etc.). This will allow the developers to
objectively rate simulations for their educational
value. What we will find is that the most
effective simulations are a blend of fiction
and nonfiction. They present real information
in dramatic, fictional, yet plausible contexts. |
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• Virtual communities,
GPS, and GIS.
By 2016 it will be easy to find virtual communities,
overlaid on GIS maps of one's own metropolitan
or suburban locations, whose culture and inhabitants
you find inspiring. Imagine when there is
such a density of online virtual worlds users
that you can use them to talk locally in a
virtualization of your neighborhood. Some
of us will use these virtual worlds to check
the availability of our our friends and associates
in physical space, with GPS
updating their physical movements and presence
management software telling us their status. |
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• More intentional, less
materialistic virtual communities. Forming
social ties in virtual worlds, where the physical
and economic detriments we are born into do
not have to be visible or relevant to first
inspection, will greatly improve the quality
and authenticity of social interaction among
some of tomorrow's intentional
communities. A minority of self- and community-development
oriented economic, social, scientific, and
religious communities will emerge, groups
that are less interested in where you came
from, what you have, or what you look like,
but rather your "vector", what you
are able to accomplish every day both as self-reported
and as group-assessed. Such virtual communities
are advantaged by the ability to ignore physical
circumstances and disabilities that aren't
relevant to the goals of the community. Imagine
a world that faithfully telegraphs your values
and interests profile and the microfeatures
of your physical facial expressions to your
avatar, but strips all else, including physique,
fashion, and physical surroundings. In such
a place, the aspirations, values, and personality
attributes of the user become paramount, and
one's progress can become the central concern,
even to the neglect of all else. For those
few desiring it, such communities will stand
on their own against tomorrow's increasingly
materialistic and personalized consumer culture. |
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• New virtual
communities will create a physical
world co-housing boom. Tomorrow's virtual
worlds will allow increasing diversity of
social behavior among consenting inhabitants.
Tomorrow's virtual communities will facilitate
the emergence of co-housing and intentional
communities in physical space, for a broad
range of subcultures (artists, social activists,
hobbyists, fangroups, scientists). In space-limited
urban environments, several of today's aging
and older condo associations may be subject
to takeovers by virtually-organized communities,
and their codes, covenants, and restrictions
(CC&Rs) rewritten to align with the goals
of the new community. New forms of defense
against this kind of takeover might also emerge. |
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• Virtual citizenship.
What makes virtual worlds interesting is the
people we find in them, and the things we
can do with them. Joi
Ito said there are times when he spends
more time in an airplane than on the ground
and that in any city he goes to he can go
to World
of Warcraft to reconnect with his friends.
Nick Yee
has stats that some gamers and Second Life
users are already reporting that they "live"
in their virtual worlds. Will our future home
be physical or virtual space? What does it
take for us to flip our allegiance mostly
to the virtual? |
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• 3D wikipedia.
Within the next decade we can hope that many
wikipedia pages will have simulations, and
wikipedia
stubs for simulations, that are designed
to teach us abstract concepts. One could imagine
short, medium, and long versions. |
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11.
Negative (Warning) Scenarios. Negative
or warning vignettes to avoid.
11A. Negative Scenarios - Technology
and Science
•
Peer-to-peer
becomes a platform for a growing range of
illegal activity. While full
digital transparency seems a very likely
long term developmental attractor, it is
unlikely that in the next decade our emerging
internet immune systems (technological,
economic, and sociopolitical) will be robust
enough to monitor fine-grained content sharing
on the internet. During this "Wild
West" frontier period, peer-to-peer
(P2P) networks may continue to have minimal
community oversight or transparency. P2P
is a powerful distributed computing technology
with many legitimate uses (Skype,
etc.) but the lack of a client-server architecture
makes it difficult to prevent or prosecute
unlawful uses. Today the leading unlawful
use is for intellectual property subversion
(BitTorrent,
etc). In some circles such behavior is considered
a justifiable reaction to today's coarse-grained
and restrictive IP licensing law, which
may explain its social prevalence. But P2P
worlds that support online anonymous criminal
behavior of a more pernicious type (hate
societies, organized crime, income tax advoidance,
etc.) might also emerge. While penalties
for unsanctioned P2P use might be an obvious
control strategy, such a bureaucratic response
might have a significant dampening effect
on innovation with this technology. |
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• Tool development challenge.
If the metaverse remains a space without powerful
tools for user-generated content, this will
significantly restrict the promise of the
medium. Could 3D cyberspace become yet another
television, which FCC chairman Newton Minow
famously called a vast
wasteland by comparison to its promise?
Will virtual worlds remain a place where content
is primarily created by professionals, to
entertain passive, anesthetized consumers?
The quality and usability of free content
generation tools (SketchUp,
etc.) the ease of use of their APIs,
and the tech support available to individual
users will be major determinants of the near
term collaborative capacity of metaverse development. |
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• Common online
identity standards aren't worked out.
Collaborative filtering middleware for sharing
online reputation/trust data doesn't get developed,
or there are technology overhead problems
with early implementations which significantly
delay the emergence of federated virtual worlds.
All the important VWs remain content islands,
and it is still unreasonably hard to find,
rate, and recommend the best content in 2016. |
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• We don't see an automated
identification/local positioning technology
(RFID, etc.) get cheap and small enough to
move beyond early adopters by 2016. The promise
of the open standard augmented reality/GIS
web remains unfulfilled. |
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• Any of a host of other
metaverse S&T enablers (see S&T
enabler table) are either underfunded,
understudied, or don't develop as optimistically
as expected. |
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11B. Negative Scenarios - Business and
Economics
•
By 2016, a few well publicized catastrophic
events in the physical world might force us
into accelerated synthetic world adoption
before the technology is mature, which would
saddle us with "early adopter" costs
and might keep the global economy in an extended
recessionary state. One spur to early virtualization
would be a few more high-profile terrorist
strikes in the developed world during the
next decade, especially on the global transportation
system. A global pandemic, or a series of
small epidemics, would also push strongly
in this same direction. Another ten years
of global
warming might convince many that we need
to cut down our travel and conserve energy
until we've made a transition to sustainable
energy systems. But carbon sustainablity won't
be possible until the middle or end of this
century, so this could lead to several decades
of increasing reduction in travel. High fossil
fuel energy prices during this period would
also strongly reinforce the virtualization
trend. As one upside, though certainly not
a fully compensating one, any of these events
would be a strong impetus to improving virtual
collaboration tools. |
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• The economic value
of user-created virtual content may not be
enough to support a flowering of independent
businesses, or it may be enough to do so only
in the developing world, versus the developed
world. Right now, a kid in Second Life who
makes custom avatars based on your digital
pictures can earn a decent income doing this
full time. Once the Chinese gold
farmers enter this space, however, will
she still be able to pay the rent on her artist's
loft doing this in 2015? This is a key question
that isn't clear in the short run. |
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• Intellectual
property enforcement uncertainty. How
will virtual IP enforcement issues play out
in coming years? Right now, a number of popular
brands, from ABBA
to UPS,
are being aped and mashed up in new ways in
virtual space. Most of this can be thought
of as free promotion, and may be harmless
as long as money isn't being made, but as
digital artists start supporting themselves
off user-created content, the stakes go up.
The lawyers go where the dollars flow. The
worst of the content pirates could be dealt
with by user
reputation systems and other types of
gentle and intelligent deterrences, but such
a fine-grained solutions may not develop without
a combination of both corporate forbearance
and good leadership on the legislative side.
Heavy-handed enforcement of IP in virtual
space could have a significant chilling
effect on virtual creativity and the development
of small business in virtual space. What's
worse, we would probably see a disproportionate
squelching of virtual artist activity in the
developed world, where IP law is easier to
enforce. Thus we'd shackle our own virtual
innovativeness first, because prosecution
is easier here. |
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• Social
skills/pay class inequalities continue to
grow. Will the income
disparity (wage gap) between the virtually
skilled and those not participating in VWs
increase as more powerful tools emerge in
the metaverse? In the short run, we might
see an increased rich-poor divide, both globally
and in the U.S., unless we make sure that
digital technology's inherently democratizing
capabilities are used broadly early on, rather
than reserved to a select few. Certainly we’ve
seen this disparity effect in the last few
decades trend of CEO pay vs. average workers
pay. CEOs of many corporations now earn truly
ridiculous multiples by comparison to their
lowest paid worker, a dynamic also seen in
the still-increasing salary gap between first
and emerging nations, a gap that some predict
may continue for another 30 years before rationalizing.
Likewise, the first powerful versions of metaverse
economic networks may disproportionately aid
powerful MNCs over small businesses in the
early years. |
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• 3D expands
the reign of spam or aggressive advertising.
What does spam or aggressive advertising look
like in a pervasive 3D space? We could be
surrounded by it. Inundated by viruses, spam
and advert crapware that most of us have currently
become accustomed to in e-mail and on the
web. Alternative: we might give marketing
departments more credit than that. Coke
Studios 2.5D virtual space has two-and-a-half
million people playing inside it, being inundated
by their own consent. Nevertheless, a community
that was still tolerant/resigned to either
uncontrolled spam or aggressive advertising
on the 3D web in 2016, unless you are willing
to pay a "premium subscription,"
cleverly high enough to always exclude most
of the middle class users, would be a serious
dystopia, a dark victory of the corporatocracy
over individual rights to mental freedom in
one's personal space. |
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11C. Negative Scenarios - Social, Legal
and Other
•
Bandwidth improvement remains weak in the
U.S. for another ten years. One of the greatest
negative U.S. scenarios on the radar would
be a continued lack
of federal political leadership in subsidizing
the accelerated deployment of
fiber to the home (FTTH) nationally
[82]. True ubiquitous broadband access is
today the primary bottleneck for just about
every major metaversal advance we can imagine
in the next few decades. Verizon's FiOS
FTTH, the only major carrier that has been
willing to risk FTTH deployment in the current
economic climate (a bold move for them given
the first mover disadvantages in this market),
provides 5 to 50 Mbps of downstream bandwidth
(2-5 upstream) today, at an average installation
cost to Verizon of $1,000 per customer.
This is 5 to 50 times faster than the conventional
1 Mbps that the vast majority of American
"broadband" users get from the
DSL/Cable duopoly. At 10 Mbps and above,
whole new online markets, such as internet
television, videoconferencing, video on
demand, etc. become highly attractive to
the consumer. Asian and European broadband
markets, with more active political involvement,
are two to five years more developed in
broadband penetration (wireless and wired)
than the U.S., by various estimates. In
various studies, the U.S presently ranks
12th to 16th in broadband penetration per
100 citizens, down from 4th in 2001, due
to market and policy failures. One 2005
study estimated that widespread broadband
adoption in the U.S. "could add $500
billion to the economy and create 1.2 million
new jobs over the next decade" [80].
We pay a steep price for our laissez-faire
attitude toward this critical commodity,
and we may continue to do so due to advocacy
of market-only mechanisms in this space.
There are many options for better leadership,
including mandates, precompetitive basic
research, aggressive subsidization of the
cost per customer for early deployment,
and competition at the state and local level
for deployment acceleration funds. Wake
up, America! How far will we fall before
we get leadership that can address this
issue? |
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•
Massive VW addiction that promotes social
dysfunction. A prescient book on this, exploring
television's massive cultural impact, is
Neil Postman's Amusing
Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in
the Age of Show Business, 1986.
By 2016, the metaverse may be a powerfully
addictive environment for entertainment
and escape. With no rules to stop them,
major entertainment conglomerates may support
huge cash prizes for participation in virtual
world games, which are watched and rated
by millions as reality internet television.
Many of these would likely be sophisticated
descendents of U.S. reality television and
Japanese humiliation contest shows, like
Most
Extreme Elimination Challenge (MXC)
[54]. Would-be contestants seeking to get
on the more popular shows in 2016 would
probably have to "level up" through
a range of preliminary online games and
challenges, all purchased online at fat
premiums, and each with their own minor
online audiences. Picture a world where
a small universe of top players all earn
six figure incomes, cross-promoted ad nauseum
by the corporate megafranchises, but millions
more of our youth (in the U.S. and other
electronically-saturated developed countries)
work as "subsistence gamers,"
idolizing the "stars" of this
new genre but barely making ends meet as
full-time players of commercially-developed
fantasies, all fed 24/7 to a culture of
celebrity and instant boredom. The standard
definition of addiction is something done
to the point of social dysfunction. If you
lose your job or relationship because you
are playing an online game too much, that's
dysfunctional. If instead you play the game
to generate social value or strengthen relationships,
then it isn't dysfunctional. It is true
that the dominant normative belief today
is that working in the PW is more valuable
than working in the VW, and it is also very
likely that this assumption will naturally
invert in coming years or decades. Nevertheless,
it will likely take a few years (decades?)
for virtual worlds to be truly productive
enough for this to occur. Furthermore, even
if the capability emerges early to use VWs
more productively than the physical world,
that doesn't mean such use will be the most
common choice. A dystopian VW scenario would
have a few games that are edifying, skill-building,
and instructive, but the vast majority pandering
to general populace more superficial and
disconnected from reality than ever before.
The gulf between those few using virtual
worlds for understanding, productivity,
and empowerment and the majority using them
for distraction, insulation, and personal
indulgence may grow. It helps to remember
that there is a declining marginal utility
to pure entertainment in any culture. If
too much time is spent in slickly-engineered
virtual entertainment spaces by the young,
we risk reducing their desire to make a
contribution to the world at large, relegating
them to the status of passive consumers.
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•
Loss of appreciation and skill in embodied,
physical world experience, and human independence.
As it becomes easier use avatars and other
systems of telepresence in coming years, a
growing percentage of us may become less interested
in interacting or functioning in the outside
world. Many physical world skills may atrophy
in the process. The classic cautionary tale
here is the famed novelist E.M. Forster’s
science fiction short story The
Machine Stops, written way back in
1909. This prescient story predicted many
aspects of online life twenty years before
the television and seventy years before the
internet were even invented. In the plotline,
poisoned air forces people to live underground
in machine cells in physical isolation but
intimately connected electronically. In this
world, as physical contact drops off, people
come to view direct experience as inferior
to secondhand, electronically mediated experience,
which is as comfortable and predictable as
it is isolating. They eventually come to see
messy physical contact as terrifying and vulgar
– preferring all experience through
the interface. This future hits closer to
home than we would like. If one of the organizing
principles of the twentieth century was bringing
people to things – aircraft, ships,
etc, then the paradigm of the twenty first
may be about bringing things to people –
like Amazon, UPS, Netflix, Second Life, and
Safeway.com. Perhaps in a dystopian far future
only the rich will still travel occasionally
to meet face to face. Poor global management
would have ensured that physical travel is
too dangerous, expensive, or unsustainable
for all but the wealthiest. That would leave
the masses dwelling in our advertising-driven
Matrix-pods (electronic cottages), getting
our digital soma delivered to us daily, and
liking it. Brave
New World comes to mind. So does
the brilliant dystopia Feed,
2004, by M.T. Anderson. In this world a global
youth who have the internet jacked into their
brains a few decades hence (an augmented reality
setup would be sufficient however, no "implant"
is needed), have as a result of this constant
stimulation lost most of their ability to
do complex speech and thinking. They've been
reduced to imbeciles in the electronic womb.
Let's try to ensure the next ten years don't
take us a big step closer to this depressing
vision. |
|
•
A lost generation due to the seduction and
safety of virtual spaces compared to the
unpleasantness and unpredictability of physical
spaces. While we will have gained many astounding
new capacities with virtual technologies,
some of us may become dependent on the metaverse
to the point of physical world dysfunction.
A great surprise in recent years has been
that so many of our youth, the traditional
risk takers in society, have become so willing
to give up and retreat to fantasy worlds
when adversity strikes them in the physical
world. Japan was perhaps the first early
indicator of this in the 1990's with the
rise of the hikikomori,
or social shut-ins, predominantly young
males (at first) who had given up on the
intense cultural pressures to succeed in
school and withdrawn into television, music,
and games. A great recent book on this is
Michael Zielenziger's Shutting
out the Sun: How Japan Created its Own Lost
Generation, 2006 [81]. The Japanese
Ministry of Health defines hikikomori as
individuals who isolate themselves away
from society and to a significant but lesser
extent, family, for a period exceeding six
months, often in their parent's house. In
2005 the Ministry proposed a conservative
estimate of 50,000 hikikomori, but Tamaki
Saito, the psychologist who coined the phrase,
estimates as many as 1 million Japanese,
or twenty percent of all male adolescents
[56] exhibited a significant degree of the
shut-in syndrome. Similar withdrawal phenomena
have been observed in other Asian cultures,
as well as some high-profile crimes by hikikomori
when they venture back into society after
isolated dysfunctional development [57].
School dropout rates are considered a strong
early indicator of hikikomori behavior.
Virtual worlds may in the years since 2006
be increasingly implicated in feeding the
NEET
(Not currently engaged in Employment, Education,
or Training) phenomenon first documented
in the U.K., the Twixter
demographic identified in the U.S., and
the Freeter
demographic in Japan. Such problems could
be much greater in 2016. Even with significantly
lower graduation standards in recent decades,
10% of U.S. youth aged 16-24 in 2003 had
both not completed high school and were
not enrolled to do so [58]. The seduction
of withdrawing into fantasy and isolation
is strong, and is the greatest in cultures
where the pressure to succeed is seen by
youth as unrealistic by comparison to the
opportunities available in the outside world.
Socially unproductive pastimes like gambling
may grow to new levels of obsession and
excess, the way online
poker has in recent years in the U.S.
As globalization increases "unpleasant"
competition and virtual worlds increase
their stickiness, we may see substantially
more hikikomori-style behavior. We are increasingly
seeing social acceptance that living an
"inside world" rather than an
"outside world" may be viewed
as a lifestyle choice in the freedom-loving
U.S., and doesn't have to be a pathology.
This is quite unsettling for some of the
older generation, but it seems the wave
of the future. The key question facing us
all, now, is what quality of individual
and social life that choice truly affords,
here in 2006. |
|
•
A differential socieconomic development advantage
may go to "collectivist countries"
during the early years (even decades) of virtual
worlds. Social theorists have observed two
fundamental polarities in human values, a
division betwen societies focused more on
rights/freedoms/individualism,
and those focused more on duties/responsibilities/collectivism.
Of the two, the U.S. is much more focused
on the former, and China much more on the
latter. Countries like Korea,
arguably the nation most extensively and aggressively
using virtual worlds to date, are clearly
more on the collectivist side than on the
individualist side, though their democracy
and individual freedoms have grown strongly
in the last three decades. Do virtual worlds,
particularly in their early instantiation,
reward social collectivism more than they
reward individualism? If so, then we may be
in for several years or even decades where
countries with stronger collectivist values
will be able to control the "bad"
uses of virtual worlds better (e.g., curb
addictions before they impact social performance
and cohesion), yet also enjoy higher percentages
of "good" virtual world use overall
(again, look to Korea and their obsessive
use of social virtual worlds like Cyworld).
By contrast, countries with strong individual
freedoms may allow their youth to gravitate
to more entertainment-oriented VWs in the
early decades, before they have become powerful
enough to equally reward creativity, education,
collaboration, and personal development. Some
would argue that the hikikomori
in Japan are a result of new individual freedoms
in pampered youth as much as they are a result
of rejection of an overly oppressive social
culture. The United State's "freedom
bias" on the individualism/collectivism
balance makes us pay a price of greater social
disconnectedness but also gives us a dividend
of greater inventiveness. This may however
be a serious disadvantage in the early years
of these accelerating technologies, while
they are powerful enough to attract our attention
but not yet powerful enough to do as much
for us in the way of productive collaboration.
This would argue that the development of the
"serious side" of the metaverse,
specifically its collaboration tools, education
platforms, and virtual economies, and is a
particularly important early goal for Western
societies, lest we become stuck in the quicksand
of a laissez-faire developed virtual Disneyland
in its early years. An almost entertainment-exclusive
early metaverse would certainly serve the
largest multinational
corporations and media congomerates just
fine--they are after all global, and the U.S.
consumer is just another market to them. We
must not forget that their allegiance is,
and must be, to the bottom line. All of this
is intended to argue that what we certainly
don't need in the Western world is another
ten years of games and distractions that are
primarily insubstantial, passive consumerist
candy for the eyeballs of another generation
of Western youth. Second
Life, an almost entirely user-created
world, is a promising antithesis to this on
the web, at the present time. Nevertheless
there is a definite limit to the collaboration,
education and bona fide economic value that
can be produced in today's user-generated
virtual spaces, at present. Let us pray that
platforms like this get the resources to improve
fast enough to provide an alternative to ten
more years of passive digital distraction
for our uniquely free, unfettered, and therefore
easily distracted American youth. |
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•
Resurgence of cults and extremist groups,
both economic and ideological. The more popular
synthetic worlds today are designed with sophisticated
marketing and psychological research to become
as immersive, addictive, and obsessive as
possible for the user. This takes money and
talent today, but will be much easier in coming
years. A negative scenario would have gangs
and cults of all types, including psychologically
abusive prosperity cults and MLM
scams, getting sophisticated in their ability
to prey on those who are particularly psychologically
suggestible, disempowered, and looking for
an accepting community. Ten years from now,
the possibility of demagogic leaders to create
virtual cults, attracting the most victimizable
netizens will be in full flower. Without adequate
preparation and early intervention, a lot
of people's lives may be hijacked by unscrupulous
people. Hopefully the most extreme versions
of such groups, such as hate
groups, may be expected to be infiltrated
and moderated in tomorrow's increasingly transparent
society. Nevertheless, the effect of the iinternet
to date has been a new proliferation of such
groups, which is leading to new civil rights
laws and norms with regard to online conduct.
There are only a handful of civil rights NGOs
today, like the Southern
Poverty Law Center, that aggressively
seek to challenge the expansion of online
hate groups in court. As virtual worlds increase
in sophistication we may see a more subtle
version of this problem replay itself again. |
|
•
Childraising risks in our increasingly virtual
future. One summit participant (a male) suggested
that some moms in 2016 may learn to raise
their infants while using one-handed interfaces,
allowing them to remain engaged in virtual
worlds. That would certainly be an informal
(and let us hope infrequent) experiment on
how continuous
partial attention affects the child. Another
would be placing infants in virtual worlds
themselves, which might also catch on among
some of today's convenience-minded parents,
particularly if worlds could be found which
would emotionally “placate” the
child. It would be very difficult to assess
in advance the consequences of such choices,
but like most new technologies, it would be
safe to expect the first generation to be
net dehumanizing, before the kinks are worked
out. With luck this issue will be so contentious
that it would be something avoided by all
but a tiny handful of early adopters, whose
development could be studied and debated for
years, and while virtual technologies continued
to improve, before we saw greater social adoption. |
|
•
Cybersex
and physical world relationships. Opportunities
for increasingly graphical and sexual relationships
among netizens in virtual worlds are likely
to strain domestic partnerships in the physical
world. Benjamin Fulford reported in Forbes
in 2003 that the U.S. divorce rate in had
already risen as a result of an increasing
number of sexual affairs, both physical and
virtual, facilitated by avatars in synthetic
worlds. This claim hasn't been independently
verified to date, to our knowledge, but it
seems a plausible warning for the future. |
|
•
Loss of control of online
identity. We might see a persistence or
growth in theft, manipulation, or spoofing
of one's online identity or reputation, and
unwanted persistence of personal information
in unaccountable (P2P?) and publicly transparent
databases. Not adequately addressing such
problems would cripple the growth of the public
metaverse. Those who stand to lose most as
a result of "metaverse globalization",
particularly the powerful media
monopolies, clearly have strong incentive
to see online trust systems stay in the cradle
as long as possible. Let's hope their substantial
economic and political resources aren't enough
to delay progress in this critical area. |
|
•
Virtual worlds may promote new types of crime.
New and much more effective acts of coordinated
cyberterrorism
may be facilitated by virtual or mirror worlds
(GIS
systems). New forms of personal griefing,
attacks, or even simulated rape in cyberspace
may emerge, and be prosecuted in real physical
courts. |
|
•
Social homogeneity due to next-generation
social
software. The continued development
of online filtering tools will make it easy
to find like-minded people all over the
world. Humans evolved, however, in non-choice
groupings, and had to learn to deal with
and relate to extremely differing points
of view. Furthermore, there is good evidence
of the value of independent and diverse
members in any collective. See for example
James Surowiecki's The
Wisdom of Crowds, 2004 [83]. If
we don't have adequate diversity-promoting
mechanisms in the early versions of our
virtual social software, most of it may
reinforce homogeneity and in-group polarization.
|
|
•
Mounting legal liabilities with regard to
social/sexual
predators may inhibit early development
of the metaverse. Summit quote: "One
regulatory thing that presently causes great
trouble for companies starting new worlds
is social predators. We have all these clients
who come up to us and say we want to do these
things in all these virtual worlds, but our
customer base bridges teenagers and adults.
What do we do?" Some worlds bridge this
base like WoW. But the 1998 Children's
Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
and related laws have pushed a number of companies
to segregate their teenage community, at substantial
cost and complexity. We may see increasingly
onerous regulation in this space, which would
greatly limit growth of the worlds in the
short term. Much of this regulation may have
dubious public benefit. |
|
• Distributed
virtual worlds may run into complex international
and national copyright issues as large corporations
make increasingly onerous claims to the
infrastructure of the metaverse, while individuals
claim intellectual
property rights over their own creations.
International judges may increasingly rule
in favor of the individual content creators
as they constitute the "collaborative
majority" involved in the creation
of those virtual spaces where open building
is allowed. While this "open metaverse"
has much promise, it will likely take many
years to clarify the meaning of individual
copyright and IP in virtual spaces. |
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12.
Wildcard (Low Probability) Scenarios.
Wildcards (low probability but high potential
positive or negative impact) to be aware of.
12A. Wildcard Scenarios - Technology
and Science
•
A superior open source VW solution emerges
early. Mozilla
Foundation developed Firefox
a great browser with growing market share
(12 to 30% in developed nations) and some
of the brightest minds in web development
behind it, primarily because they have a viable
open source model. A similar solution for
the 3D web could be highly disruptive, especially
if it was backed by well-defined Creative
Commons intellectual property sharing
options. While it seems unlikely, W3C,
IEEE,
or another such body might hoist the petard
early on. This might massively accelerate
the development of infrastructure for a global
metaverse. |
|
•
A respected "3D Operating System"
standard emerges early. A major internet player
(Google?
Yahoo?)
makes a sufficiently advanced 3D web browser,
like Second
Life but with much greater functionality,
easy to use content creation tools, and makes
it freely available for world creation, along
with a server backbone that handles large
portions of the processing for these worlds
(in combination with the client), and facilitates
both centralized and distributed world creation
and micropayments for transactions within
worlds. Such a system could become a dominant
platform, a "3D operating system,"
gaining significant or even majority (>50%
share) of virtual worlds development. However,
many tough challenges would have to be overcome
for this to be possible, and in a fast moving
technology environment this seems unlikely.
Just look at the wide number of 3D
graphics software platforms available
today (at least 60 with significant followings).
There are promising early starts, such as
Open
Croquet, but no one system has yet managed
to claim dominance for long in this highly
innovative and immature space, at present. |
|
•
Virtual identity
fraud is a persistent, growing problem.
As the value of virtual world economies goes
up, gangs of cyberfrausters get much better
at systematic schemes to capture and launder
virtual currency. Online identity schemes
in a major world are cracked by a distributed
processing hacker ring, and the resultant
chaos and customer dissatisfaction manages
to cause one of the major VW providers to
go into bankrupcty. |
|
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12B. Wildcard Scenarios - Business and
Economics
•
Physical world currency drains occur because
of superior growth prospects in virtual markets.
The currency used in leading virtual worlds
(Google's,
etc.) becomes seen as at least or even more
legitimate than U.S. currency, among a significant
sector of the investing public. U.S. currency,
due to the mismanagement of our massive U.S.
public debt ($9 trillion and accelerating
in 2006) has continued a humiliating devaluation
against the Chinese yuan, the euro, and other
major currencies. Meanwhile the GDPs of leading
virtual economies, while no longer in the
triple digit growth of their youth, still
continue to grow at 30-40% a year, 3 to 4
times faster than China, and with currencies
that continue to appreciate against the dollar.
Prominent economists note the superior monetary
policies and economic stability of virtual
currency in leading worlds. Facing a mini-banking
crisis due to currency shifts and withdrawals
from U.S. banks, the feds enact laws on maximums
of virtual world currency that can be held,
which further increases demand and hoarding
via anonymous accounts. Policymakers consider
stabilizing the U.S. dollar by backing it
with federal "metaverse dollars."
The public is not impressed. |
|
•
Virtual pet entertainment systems have become
an important market in pet-obsessed developed
countries. Many of our pets (dogs, cats, even
birds) can recognize their own species likeness
in a mirror. It is also a well-known fact
that most pets are bored, unclean, and understimulated
in the typical home. By 2015 we see the first
pet entertainment and exercise systems where
the pet chases lights on the sensor pads on
the floor and watches both the floor and the
video screen in order to get a treat. These
will become increasingly popular in apartments
and other areas where pets don’t get
out enough. An ancillary product will be affordable
pet toilet/shower/brushing igloos, which reward
the pet for visiting them, and which ensure
the pet is clean smelling and loose hair-free
on exit. For best results pets will be trained
to use these from birth. For reference, a
mixed reality
pet entertainment system for a rooster
was built in Singapore in 2004. Expect more
of these attempts. |
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12C. Wildcard Scenarios - Social, Legal
and Other
•
Peer-to-peer,
serverless metaverse networks might emerge,
with encrypted data passing between those
running the system (e.g., 3D versions of Freenet).
Such shared spaces, either with open public
access or darknets
(trust networks only) might be used primarily
to perpetuate an economy of copyright infringement,
piracy, unreported economic transactions,
and other grey
market activities. They could even attempt
to develop their own independent currency
and government. A few could be used to perpetuate
more serious illegal activity (organized crime,
hate and terror groups, child pornography,
etc.). These developments would likely spur
overly restrictive laws regarding the use
of any P2P programs beyond a sanctioned fueew,
and would hasten the development of a next
generation internet, with packet authentication
at its core, and would lead to the eventual
dismantling of much of the first generation
network, at least in MDC’s. Resistance
to this new mandate of control would create
additional social backlash.
|
|
•
High-impact cybercrime may lead to excessive
governmental control of cyberspace. A few
well publicized cyberterrorism
acts, that cause mass panic and death in
some cities, may allow the government to
require online
identity validation and a host of new
bureaucratic impediments to virtual experimentation. |
|
•
An international court might allow metaverse
worlds to declare themselves to be under the
jurisdiction of
international law. The court could recognize
the right of virtual nations to set up their
own laws, when they do not conflict with international
law. Physical nations may then restrict their
citizens from access to these worlds, but
the international court and other international
bodies would not recognize their right to
do so. Opportunity for civil disobedience
in regard to VW participation would then be
engaged in by activist
groups in repressive nations. |
|
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13.
Headlines. Metaverse-related news headlines
we might see in the next ten years, from the highly
plausible to the improbable.
13A. Headlines - Technology and Science
•
International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) demands
control over internet naming system. |
|
•
Metaverse Operating System Protocols emerge. |
|
•
New tools and automation engines allow User-created
and user-automated content to replace centrally
authored content creation. |
|
•
"Digital
Twin" (aka "Digital Me")
avatars become popular with youth. |
|
•
Conversational
interface mainstreams. Eight word average
spoken query/conversation length with avatars
and general web. |
|
•
Personal avatars
used as representatives and attention mediators
in communication platforms. |
|
•
CPU market in decline. Network and metaverse
processing increasingly based on DPUs (Distributed
Processing Units) |
|
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13B. Headlines - Business and Economics
•
Anshe
Chung makes $1,000,000 in 2011 in Second
Life. [Note: Ailin Graef, the real life persona
behind Anshe Chung, achieved a total virtual
net worth of $1M in Nov 2006, starting
from $10 in May 2004. Through her company,
Anshe Chung Studios, she is presently on track
to earn in excess of $1M/year well before
2011.]. |
|
•
Myspace
partners with and enters Second Life. |
|
•
Blizzard
Entertainment open sources WoW operating
system. |
|
•
Microsoft Worlds raises online world subscription
fee, loses residents to Google Worlds. |
|
•
The IRS begins taxing virtual currency. |
|
•
Decline in business travel directly linked
to metaverse. More tourists now visit virtual
San Francisco than real SF. |
|
•
Metaverse GWP "on track" to surpass
US GDP by 2035, experts say. |
|
•
Second
Life finally allows people to use their
real names "in world." |
|
•
A hit song emerges that originated with a
bard in an MMOG. |
|
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13C. Headlines - Social, Legal and Other
•
Google, Yahoo enter virtual worlds space. |
|
•
UNICEF
announces crackdowns on virtual sweatshops. |
|
•
AOL
joins Second
Life, the innovators and "cool people"
leave (ouch!). |
|
• US
government declares online
gambling in virtual
currencies illegal. |
|
•
US government requires proof of identity to
create online game accounts. |
|
• Child
pornography simulation ring revealed in
SL. Public demands online
identity cards, no more virtual anonymity. |
|
•
Everyone desiring social recognition has become
a destination. "We are all famous to
15 people." |
|
•
A billionaire metaverse citizen secedes from
his/her nation state. |
|
•
Metaverse hype backlash: Old jokes that used
to have a VRML
punch line now end in SL (Second Life). |
|
•
A 2012 U.S. presidential candidate campaigns
in a virtual world. |
|
•
Major political figure resigns when chat log
of virtual conversations is released. [Note:
This just happened! Congressman Mark
Foley, Sept 2006] |
|
•
Distributed virtual world runs into jurisdictional
issues when 1/2 is hosted in US and 1/2 in
China. Legal conflict ensues. |
|
•
Virtual
sex addiction on the rise. A virtual rape
and virtual murder both to court (psychological
damages, public humiliation). |
|
•
AOL 3D world a successful "walled garden"
for significant minority. "Benevolent"
censorship, user acquiescence to lack of diversity. |
|
•
Nation states create successful "walled
gardens" to preserve cultural heritage. |
|
•
Nationalistic virtual warfare on the rise.
Chinese guilds hunt down US players on Chinese
virtual "territory." Vigilantism
escalation. |
|
•
First codex of metaverse laws published by
W3C
affiliate |
|
• Virtual
worlds ambassador recognized by EU. |
|
•
Metaverse residents seek to form their own
government, complete with taxes, representation,
security. Recognized by a few minor countries. |
|
•
A domestic terror group trains in Second Life
on models of a U.S. city. Dept
of Homeland Security opens a permanent
space in SL. |
|
• Astrophysicist's
virtual
universe now better for for many types
of research than the physical universe. |
|
•
Network/metaverse affordable
digital access is ruled an international
human right.
|
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•
Metaverse TV and Internet
TV features more popular than HDTV |
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