• How do we foster an adequate base of metaverse academic research, in service to its further development? We need to better understand the metaverse both as a social space/world and separately as an educational or commercial platform/tool, depending on context. As one example, Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning (DML) is the MacArthur Foundation's promising new $50M initiative to gather what is known about how digital media and learning (DML) technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life, and to seed innovation for continued growth. Getting other groups to lead in this area (National Science Foundation, National Academies of Science, etc.), or not, will be a key challenge and social choice for this generation.

• Global immersion, a new platform and model for news media. CNN made its franchise as the first network with instantaneous global digital reach. But this requires an expensive network of international reporters, and set the stage for the rise of the more profitable newstainment options like Fox News, which gives the illusion of global reach without the global reporters, and makes up for their lack of depth with partisanship instead of accuracy. But the coming of global 3G networks, high resolution video on cellphones, and virtual worlds and internet television platforms on which to stream citizen media will allow the emergence ofglobal networks both cheaper and more telepresent than CNN. Real 3D video and audio taken by volunteer and citizen journalists, amalgamated by a network of editors that summarize and abstract it for public consumption will become a powerful new tool for informing the world. Korea's OhMyNews, already the fifth largest print newspaper in Korea, is an early example. There will certainly be a number of other business models that take advantage of global immersion technology.

• Knowing when to use the 2D and 3D web in single vs. multi-user mode. Usage patterns of these two modes is likely to be similar to human behavior in physical space. The 3D web may generally be most useful for multi-user experience, but there will still be single-user usages. By contrast, the 2D web is be most useful for single-user experience, but there will still be some multi-user usages. When is it valuable for you to know that 1, 10 or 100 other folks are viewing the same web page as you? Amazon doesn't tell you this, and you are thankful. When Google spreadsheets tells you, its often just annoying. We need good design priorities that help users understand when multi-user mode is and isn't useful, and the option to customize.

• Let's try to get past the use of "real world" as a comparison when we refer to virtual worlds. Rather than the misleading dichotomy of "real world" and "virtual world," or even "real life (RL)" and "second life (SL)," a more accurate pairing is "physical world (PW)" and "virtual world (VW)," and "physical life (PL)" and "virtual life (VL)." When we call the physical the "real" we label the virtual the unreal, which just isn't true. "Virtual reality" is an accurate phrase, because virtual is a special type of reality. The virtual is as real as thought, emotion, consciousness, and other "abstract" informational spaces. The "virtual/physical" dichotomy isn't perfect, as virtual spaces (human thought, virtual worlds) are still physically based (action potentials flowing in neurons, electrons flowing in digital circuits). But these processess are abstract, with emergent meanings beyond the physical. Using the word "virtual" in referring to our electronic systems, as opposed to "informational" or any other, allows us to emphasize a process of global development, a new system transition for local intelligence that is occurring all around us.

• In our best current assessment, the history of local complex systems development has been the movement into ever more ethereal, ephemeral, less physical, more virtual forms. In other words, our technological informational systems are today moving beyond the physical in a very important way. This is the full meaning of the word virtual, and a transition that Buckminster Fuller in 1938 first called the "ephemeralization" of the leading edge of complex systems in Earth's history. John Smart calls this process "MEST compression," in a more recent exploration of the virtualization trend. Over time, the most complex local complex systems in Earth's developmental history have always figured out ways to use substantially less Matter, Energy, Space, and Time to do any standard of computation or physical transformation, however measured or defined. As perhaps the most obvious example of this, human consciousness and our internal mental models are built on a very small and energy efficient (relative to genetic learning, which occurs over generations) set of physical processes in our neural structure, and are engaged in an increasingly accurate yet abstract simulation of physical space. Consciousness and human thought is therefore a highly virtual emergence. Machine thought and digital models, even in their crude form today, are more MEST-compressed, ephemeral, and virtual still, as their evolutionary development has occured in small fraction of the matter, energy, space, and time that were necessary to produce human thought. By current accounts, as we move ever further into the microcosm with the design of our digital systems, our machine models are expected to become stunningly more virtual still. At the same time, biological human beings are being lured to spend ever more of our time in virtual space. In sum, understanding the ways that all our virtual systems, both biological and technological, progressively free themselves from physical contraints will be one of the keys to better guiding the development of virtual reality in coming years.

• Impact of virtual consumption on environmental sustainability. Clearly the developed economies consume so much real goods and raw materials per capita that the rest of the world couldn’t sustainably consume at the same level. Will increasingly virtual consumption among developed economies youth help us transition to global sustainability? What will be the impact on per capita physical world consumption (goods, energy, etc.) of a fully enabled metaverse? Is the consumption of ideas and experiences (entertainment, communications, etc.) increasingly competing against the consumption of physical items? If so, this may have very positive implications for the decreasing use of energy and other resources. Parts of the traditional physical economy like business travel, even tourist travel may decline, at least per capita. The production, shipping, storing of many types of real physical goods may go down.

• Liability of virtual worlds platforms for intellectual property violation. To what degree will virtual world companies (as opposed to the infringers) be held liable under common carrier and other laws from users copying and trading in others’ intellectual property? During the first years of public photocopiers, the law was unclear to what degree the photocopier companies (Xerox, etc.) would be held liable for user infringements. This lack of clarity slowed the development of the technology, and for years only small, risktaking companies like Copico were willing to enter the self-service copying industry. The law has matured so that the user is solely liable for infringements with self-service copying, but companies that provide copying service (FedEx Kinko’s, etc.) share the liability and burden of ensuring the copying jobs they do for customers are legal. When will we see a similar clarification in virtual worlds, and to what degee will 3D world providers be held liable for self-service/user-created IP violations?