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What happens when video games
meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds
meet geospatial maps of the planet?
When simulations get real and life
and business go virtual? When you
use a virtual Earth to navigate the
physical Earth, and your avatar becomes
your online agent? What
happens is the metaverse.
Taking its name from the immersive
virtual world imagined by Neal Stephenson
in his visionary novel, Snow Crash,
the Metaverse
Roadmap (MVR) is the first public
ten-year forecast and visioning survey
of 3D Web technologies, applications,
markets, and potential social impacts.
Areas of exploration include the convergence
of Web applications with networked
computer games and virtual worlds,
the use of 3D creation and animation
tools in virtual environments, digital
mapping, artificial life, and the
underlying trends in hardware, software,
connectivity, business innovation
and social adoption that will drive
the transformation of the World Wide
Web in the coming decade.
The MVR explores multiple pathways
to the 3D enhanced web, not a single
path to a "3D-only" web.
An array of 3D web enhancements are
emerging, visual extensions to the participatory
web technologies now sweeping
the online world.
Social
search, the archiving and sharing
of our favorite online and real world
activities, ideas and experiences,
is coming of age and going visual. Wikipedia,
with over 4.6 million articles in
200 languages, is now the 20th most-visited
website. Social photosharing communities
like Flickr bring us into each other's visual
lives as never before. Democratic
social bookmarking, blogging, and
syndicating sites like Digg have grown from 17,000 to 400,000
users in 12 months. Video-enhanced
social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo now have over 200 million unique collective
users. YouTube,
currently the most popular of internet
video sites, has 100 million downloads
and 65,000 uploads per day. New browsers
like Flock make blogging, RSS syndication, ranking,
sharing, and commenting easier than
ever before.
Among social virtual worlds, the
2.5D world Habbo
Hotel now has 7 million youth
users in 18 countries. The leading
open-ended 3D virtual world platform,
Second
Life, doubled from 160,000 to
330,000 accounts in four months (March
to July 2006) and has recently been
doubling every two months, to 2.5
million by Jan 2007, when they announced
they would take their viewer open
source. The global market for
asset trading, object creation, and
services rendered in virtual worlds
is estimated at anywhere from $700
million to $2 billion per year (mostly
undocumented and untaxed at present).
In Japan, social networking sites
like GaiaX
entice their users into online games
and virtual worlds as just one of
many social options. Early location-based
games are emerging in Asia.
In the simulation space, virtual
humans are being explored for
their online educational ability.
Virtual
prototyping software is making
great strides in industry, bringing
us closer to an era of Fab
Lab prototyping and product hacking/customization.
3D
navigation systems are emerging
in the automotive market in Japan
and Europe. Local-positioning systems,
like 3M's RFID
Tracking Solution, and modeling
advances like ArcGIS,
Google
Earth, and SketchUp
are allowing us to create "mirror
world" versions of physical space
like never before...
How You Can Help
A brave new virtual world is emerging,
and we've only just begun to take
stock of its implications. We hope
you'll take time to browse this website,
starting with the Metaverse
Roadmap Overview (23 pages)
and the full set of Roadmap
Inputs (75 pages).
Please recommend this site to your
friends, and join our MVR
Mailing List if you'd like to
be informed of major Roadmap updates.
Feel free to contribute your own insights
and feedback at our Public
Wiki. Visit 3pointD.com,
an affiliate blog of the Metaverse
Roadmap, for another perpective on
the emerging 3D Web. If you have the
financial resources, become a sponsor
of the next version of this public
foresight document. Help us think
about the opportunities and challenges
ahead. It's going to take a lot of
committed folks to make the kind of
metaverse we deserve.
The MVR is organized by the Acceleration
Studies Foundation, a nonprofit
research group, and supported by a
growing team of industry and institutional
partners,
all innovators in the 3D web. Thanks
for your interest in building collective
foresight in this important space.
For a three page Roadmap Intro, click
'read more' below. |
