The Metaverse, the blanket
term for immersive 3D spaces like virtual worlds, is gaining more
and more attention as platforms are being built to cater to just
about every age group and social interest. From environments that
help parents entice their kids to do household chores to
worlds that encourage socializing (and business marketing) like
Second Life,
the space is creating opportunities that go far beyond gaming.
Thanks to Henrik Bennetsen, Research Director at Stanford’s
Humanities Lab, we have the chance to peek behind the curtain and
see what all the buzz is about. As the Conference Chair at last
month’s Metaverse U conference, he
decided to pick the brains of some of this year’s participants and
guests. Armed with a video camera, four questions were posed to
developers, researchers, and students working in the virtual world
space:
1. What excites you about current metaverse technology?
2. What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
3. What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology
on society within the next decade?
4. What barriers will metaverse technology never
overcome?
Corey Bridges, co-founder of Multiverse
Twenty-some videos are currently available on youTube with the
results. The responses were generally optimistic as to the
evolution of the metaverse for communication, collaboration, and
learning. There’s great potential for social change too. Mirror
worlds are being built to allow us to see and understand things
going on in the world that the media might typically filter out.
Many predicted a convergence between virtual worlds and social
networking, and felt the adoption rate of new mashup platforms
would only grow, due to the rate of accelerating technological
change.
The day when anyone can create a stunning 3D Augmented Reality simulation is getting closer. Last month, General Electric's innovative AR media campaign to promote its 'Smart Grid' platform helped to push Augmented Reality out into the masses by giving users a chance to try it at home using a printable marker download and webcam.
Now Digital Urban has featured a new Google Earth Plug-in and Printable Marker download developed by InGlobe Technologies. The company has expanded its Augmented Reality Media software beyond Google Sketchup into the increasingly 'mirror world'-esque Google Earth. Downloads are available on the company's ARSights.
Virtual worlds for kids are an exploding market. But what do they
mean for our youth and for the future of our society?
I just had the pleasure to sit through a Virtual Worlds 2008
session titled Kids and Tweens: Why Virtual Worlds Are The
New Saturday Morning TV during which a panel of experts
shared their thoughts on the rise of virtual worlds as the primary
form of entertainment for our youth, exhibiting what moderator
Richard Gottlieb labeled
as a “sense of overwhelming optimism” about the growing
industry.
The following are my favorite bytes and take-aways:
Jason Root, Senior Vice President, Digital, Nick.Com And
Nick At Nite.Com asserted that “gaming is the new
programming that kids gravitate to”, adding that Nickelodeon views
it and virtual worlds “as a logical extension to the web space” and
not a replacement for narrative television programming. “That leads
kids into a new open-ended experience,” said Root, noting that
what’s emerging is an audience “that hungers for both linear and
non-linear content.”
Kenneth Locker, Senior Vice President, Digital Media,
Cookie Jar Entertainment explained that virtual world
experience producers “don’t create content, they create context”,
meaning that the goal is to facilitate a variety of sticky
open-ended experiences rather than passive consumption. “TV is a
top-down medium,” he concluded, “The internet has no beginning,
middle or end.”
This is a shot that was definitely not heard around the “real
world”.
A company named Vollee has at last enabled fluid access
to 3D virtual worlds, namely Second Life, via a mobile phone.
Check out the video of their new service, currently in Beta:
While this product won’t matter to 99.9% of us (barring the SL
addicted) in the short term, it’s a big milestone for the broader
evolution of the web.
As such, we can use it to extrapolate what changes an
increasingly interactive 3D web might gradually enable:
Perhaps we’ll visit real-time representations of stores from
hundreds of miles away or more efficiently navigate shops in real
space, or more easily find jobs that allow us to work from afar, or
surf 3D social networks to see what our friends are currently doing
and where, or hop into virtual games tied into real-life locations
when we’re bored, or search the web in 3D and 2D as well as through
text and semantic search, etc.
The main point is that as we endeavor to simulate the near term
future of other domains like health, business, transporation, etc.
it’s important to consider the impact of new products like Vollee
so that we don’t miss the larger, more disruptive products and
events just over the horizon.
Virtual worlds are created by us – so why limit ourselves to
reality? We could create entirely new realities. By realising that
we are free of the rules of real life, the doors are open to
incredible new possibilities. In many ways, virtual worlds already
provide us with glimpses of alternate realities. Its time we took
notice of these instrumental differences. In the future, we may decide that a virtual existence, a
life inside a fully immersive computer game where our every desire
is fulfilled, is a more appealing option than the real world we
currently inhabit. Many people have presented the idea that we are
already in such a virtual reality, but I don’t believe this is
possible. This is because virtual worlds provide us with many
possibilities that the real world does not, so why have they not
been “programmed” into the real world we know?
Since the early 21st century, the residents of the virtual world
Second Life have been working hard to recreate real life as
accurately as possible. Despite the virtual platform giving
occupants the ability to fly and teleport, they still prefer to
meticulously create staircases to walk their avatar up and down. At
discos, people require the coolest dance animations and best
looking clothes. In meetings, virtual characters sit down to rest
their virtual legs. It seems the confines of reality provide a
comfortable and familiar environment.
But virtual worlds are created by us – so why limit ourselves to
reality? We could create entirely new realities. By realising that
we are free of the rules of real life, the doors are open to
incredible new possibilities. In many ways, virtual worlds already
provide us with glimpses of alternate realities. Its time we took
notice of these instrumental differences. (cont.)
It seems that in these times of economic decline, people don’t want to forgo the luxuries that they’ve grown accustomed to over the years, so are choosing to indulge themselves in a virtual manner instead. There’s certainly a lot to be said for staying home surrounded by cheap entertainment compared with going out and being ripped off and mugged. Could this be the future? As Virtual Reality improves, we’ll be finding it replacing more and more of the “Real Life” things we currently take for granted.
Why travel on dangerous, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly airlines when you can immerse yourself in a Virtual holiday? Google Earth and Google Street, not to mention other “virtual sightseeing” options have recently taken a lot of big steps towards this. Although virtual reality interfaces have a long way to go before we can experience all the delights of a trip to somewhere beautiful, in the next few years it will be possible to walk down a foreign street on your computer screen, with the realism of a TV documentary. You’ll be able to go into a real shop, select a real item from a real shelf, and make real purchases from the shops on this street, to be delivered to your door. In Second Life, you can already wander around the accurately recreated streets of Dublin and other major cities. Primitive as it is now, we’ll soon be taking it for granted.
In the very distant future, personal nano-fabrication devices could allow us to recreate the exact tastes and textures of foods available anywhere on Earth. And if not, computer interfaces to our brains will merely simulate the feelings and tastes of eating these exotic cuisines. Whether as part of a virtual reality interface or not, the ability to remotely indulge our senses will surely come from somewhere.
Coming soon to your living room: a wild safari in the scorching
African savanna starring you, armed with nothing but your camera.
Afrika is the next step in a generation of video games
that seek to become more than just entertainment and can actually
make you smarter.
Afrika,
the latest game by Rhino Studios, is set to be released in Japan on
the PS3 in late August. You play it from
the perspective of a nature photographer and naturalist armed with
a Nikon stalking realistic wildlife in painstakingly recreated
savannas. The photos you snap are saved like a lexicon, or
Africa-pedia, where you can read up all about the real facts of the
animal. The PS3’s multi-cored cell
processor
is being utilized to is fullest potential to recreate the complex
AI and behavior of the animals in
mirror world fashion, and it’s is just one of many in the
increasing trend of video games that are as educational as they are
made to be entertaining.
Because the game is not about rifles or grenades, it is perfect
for younger children who can learn about Africa’s wildlife in a
fully immersive 3D world rather than a bread-and-butter textbook.
And what a field trip it is without all the expenses and dangers of
being there.
But using video games to teach isn’t a new idea. An all-girls
junior
high school in Japan have already been using Nintendo DS’s to
teach English. The verdict? The students feel right at home with
the new devices. Katie Salen, a game designer and director of the
graduate Design and Technology program at
Parsons School of Design, is leading the way in using video
games as a foundation for education for an accelerating world. Her
goal is to open a school based on gaming literacy.
France-based Easy Web develops 3D video projection systems for 'monumental architecture', but could they be developing new cultural expectations for human-city interfaces where everything becomes a template?
Broadly popular virtual worlds are a relatively recent
phenomenon, and yet have taken the real world by storm. It
was just 2003 when Second Life opened its doors to the
public – it has now grown to 13,018,921 residents (as of today)
with millions of Linden dollars being
exchanged every month.
Virtual worlds evolved from basic online communities and
chatrooms. From these roots sprouted Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)
and Multi-User Shared Habitats
(MUSHes), like the first 3D shooter game Maze
War. Inspired by UK-born MUDs of the
late 1970s like AberMUD, the first
Internet-based MUD, early virtual worlds
of the 1990s were solely text-based with limited graphics and often
used a Terminal
Interface. The launch of
CyberTown in 1995, the immediate success of The Sims Online in 2002, and the
growing success of Second Life sewed the seeds for a market that
has recently begun to skyrocket. Due also in part to the steady
popularization of MMORPGs, it didn’t
take long for the rest of the world to catch on to the potential of
such virtual environments. With virtual worlds popping up
everywhere, the roster now includes World of Warcraft,
Multiverse, There.com, MetaPlace, Club Penguin and many
more.
This year’s Virtual Worlds Conference in
New York City promises to be a playground for those interested in
the Metaverse. The two day
conference agenda covers the business, operations and legal issues
for companies seeking to monetize their intellectual property with
virtual worlds.
“Virtual worlds are rapidly reshaping the toy, media, and
entertainment industries,” said Christopher Sherman, Executive
Director of the Virtual Worlds Management. “This year’s Virtual
Worlds Conference keynoters are individuals who are leading the
charge, leveraging existing content, brands and intellectual
property to create new, high-margin virtual worlds that excite,
entertain and engage audiences.”
Forget about Google vs. Microsoft, the King of Search is building its foundation for conquering the mobile web experience and introducing software services that go far beyond desktop based keyword searches. Welcome to Google’s platform of the future – Android.
The future battle for consumer ‘web apps’ might heat up faster on smart mobile devices than desktops. This puts Google in direct competition with the iPhone and its App Store. But Google must move quickly to secure relationships with handset makers, and it needs developers to fall in love with the Android platform.
Last week, Google announced its winners of the first round of Android platform applications that include: cab4me’s one-click call to local cab services based on your location, CompareEverywhere’s camera bar code based price comparison, Ecorio’s automatic calculations of your carbon footprint, Breadcrumb’s picture based map creator, and PiggyBack’s car-pooling and ride-sharing application. These applications give users much more than simple search results. They help synchronize our lives and bring the web into the real world.
These apps and others will be part of Google’s Android Marketplace -an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices.
The next two years will be an exciting time for mobile apps as mainstream Internet experiences evolve from websites to web services- and from desktops to mobile devices. The role of next generation mobile software services could be the key to success. Apple understands this future reality, but Google is not standing still- and Steve Jobs will be watching.
One of the hottest talks from this year's TED Conference is a wearable system demonstration from MIT Media Lab. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry introduce a working prototype aimed at augmenting our world with a 'Sixth Sense' layer of information using image sensing and projection systems.
On the heels of Singapore’s
announcement that it plans to throw some serious money at the
development of mixed-reality applications the slower U.S. House
Committee on Energy and Commerce has scheduled a hearing
on the issues surrounding virtual worlds.
The session, titled Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and
Avatars in a User-Generated Medium, will be held April 1 at 9:30
a.m. and
live webcast streamed for those who wish to view the
proceedings from home (or at work). It seems likely that the
potential economic value, catalytic effects and security
ramifications of user populated virtual worlds will be discussed.
No doubt this is just the beginning of broader federal recognition
of the power of this rapidly diffusing new medium.
I will be eager to see what transpires and then to discuss the
ramifications here and with all of the virtual world officionados
converging at Virtual Worlds 2008 next
week.
Virtual worlds for kids are an exploding market. But what do they
mean for our youth and for the future of our society?
In the future, we may decide that a virtual existence, a
life inside a fully immersive computer game where our every desire
is fulfilled, is a more appealing option than the real world we
currently inhabit. Many people have presented the idea that we are
already in such a virtual reality, but I don’t believe this is
possible. This is because virtual worlds provide us with many
possibilities that the real world does not, so why have they not
been “programmed” into the real world we know?
