NEW WORLD 2016

What will Second Life and other 3D online worlds, collectively known as the metaverse, look like in ten years?  Try this on:

"Invisible, unobtrusive PDAs will be the cellphones of 2016, and they will access a datascape where information is presented in a variety of contexts-- metaverse as the operating system of 2016. The walled gardens of fantasy and narrative will become just one annex among many in the metaverse, which will be an equal and parallel partner to the legacy mediums of popular culture-- music, film, TV, celebrity. Real world companies will be incubated, developed, and in large part run in the metaverse. This will engender a high degree of personal entrepreneurship—metaverse as the EBay of 2016.

"The developed world will be subsumed by the metaverse.  Developing nations will collectively share metaverse portals that will enable them to join the global economy. The datascape, providing constantly updated knowledge about every corner of the world and accessible by all, will create total transparency over politics, the health of the globe’s citizens, and the planet itself."

That's the vision statement-- the context after the break.

Last weekend was two days of cerebellum-frying cogitating on the future of online worlds at the Metaverse Roadmap, hosted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation; couple that to last Thursday's SDForum, and it all seemed like a mini-dot com boom for the metaverse, connecting tweedy academics, software developers, metaverse developers, tech evangelists, and yes, advertisers, film industry folks, and venture capitalists, many apparently impelled there by the recent BusinessWeek article on Second Life, all looking for their angle on this odd new niche of the Net.

Strange, wonderful, wonderfully strange times. 

I was a late addition to the Roadmap, which involved a series of brainstorm sessions in large and small groups.  In one of these, I was tucked in with other folks who explain worlds like Second Life to the outside world (i.e., the media.)  My session included Mark Wallace of 3pointD, Eric Gruber of MTV, Johnny Ming of Secondcast, and Jerry Paffendorf of ASF; the above statement is more or less what we hashed out between us. 

Some annotations to the terms above:

“Invisible, unobtrusive PDAs”: We had a lot of back and forth on what computers will look like 10 years from now.  I don't recall any of us getting excited about Matrix-style implants into the brain and so on, and I vetoed the holographic, airborne desktop featured in Minority Report ("You know how fast your hands would get tired using that thing ?"), so we settled on a super-powerful PDA that would probably incorporate voice and retina-activated technology.  Hence, "invisible and unobrusive", in the same sense that mobile phones are now a totally accepted, unremarkable part of the modern landscape, where that wasn't the case twenty or even ten years ago.

“a datascape where information”:  This point was most informed (at least for me) by an earlier and utterly fascinating Roadmap presentation by Michael Leibhold, who described a future Internet where Google Earth merges with pervasive digital readouts to describe the entire world in terms of data.  Look at your PDA in 2016, and you'll not just see a 3D map of your city, you'll see where the population is concentrated, and know where the high crime areas are.  (For starters.)  Jerry called this a "mirror world", other terms were proposed; I invoked presenter's privilege and went with "datascape".

“Metaverse as operating system”:  I added this bit at the very last moment, to make it plausible that the metaverse would by 2016 become a mainstream medium that reached beyond Second Life users and World of Warcraft players.  In my specific scenario, a company like Microsoft or one of its competitors buys Second Life or another virtual world, and installs it into whatever version of Windows we're using by decade's end.  By 2016, that becomes the most commonly used desktop.  (Credit for this inspiration indirectly goes to MS technology evangelist Robert Scoble-- who by total coincidence happened to walk by our table as we were writing out the statement.)

“The walled gardens”:  Instead of jumping between SL and WoW and your desktop, imagine a 3D space where you move from one reality to another.  There will always be a place for MMORPGs and worlds where you have an alternate idenity, in other words-- you just won't need to log out, to go from one to the other.

“equal and parallel partner”:  Just as MySpace launches music careers and promotes movies now, it's very easy to see a time when worlds like SL will do the same for traditional passive media.  And just like MySpace, the barrier to entry will be low, and unknown talent will have a chance to compete with the well-funded names.

"The developed world will be subsumed by the metaverse":  At some point, so much data will be constantly available in the datascape we access with our PDAs that it won't be relevant to distinguish the world from its 3D computer model.

“Developing nations will collectively share metaverse portals”:  I say "developed" above, because poorer nations will still be struggling for full access onto the Internet.  But just as international corporations ship high-end computers to India now so they can outsource technical labor, they'll ship 3D-enabled computers to the places in the globe that can still create the world's "stuff"-- not information, but foodstuffs, manufactured goods, etc.

“total transparency”:  Another point offered by Jerry, who describes a datascape with live satellite feeds, cellphone video captures, etc. which show everyone in the metaverse the state of things everywhere-- ensuring that governments don't ignore faraway troubles when they happen.  You won't check Google News to read up on a coming storm in Southeast Asia-- you'll RSS the hurricane itself.

So a vision that's optimistic, and worth arguing about.  And in my view, worth fighting for.

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