1.
History. Relevant facts in the history
of metaverse development.
1A. History - Technology and Science
•
In 1967 the Canadian
Geographic Information Systems came online.
This was the world's first operational computerized
geographic information system (GIS), built
by Roger Tomlinson at the Canadian Department
of Energy, Mines and Resources. |
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In 1977, the Apple
II microcomputer (followed by the IBM
PC in 1981) launched the mass market home
computing revolution. |
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In 1978, the first "1D" (text-based)
chat world, MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon/Domain), by Essex University's
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, emerged.
It spawned a decade of increasingly popular
text-based virtual communities run on servers.
Also during this year, Scott Adams created
Adventureland,
the first text-based themed virtual world
for home computers. Also in 1978, Ward Christensen
created CBBS,
the first privately operated BBS (phone in
community) in Chicago, IL. BBSs were run by
system operators ("SysOps") and
added a new level of decentralization to virtual
community. |
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In 1984, the Apple Macintosh
became the first commercially successful personal
computer to use a graphical user interface
(GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard
command line interface. This metaphor, copied
by the Microsoft Windows operating system
in 1985, opened up the computer screen as
a visual portal to cyberspace in an intuitive
point and click metaphor. |
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In 1987, the first 2D chat world, or "graphical
MUD," Habitat,
by Lucasfilm's Chip Morningstar and Randy
Farmer, was launched. Habitat was the first
successful attempt at a large-scale commercial
2D virtual community. In Habitat the user
was represented as an avatar,
a term coined by Chip Morningstar from the
Sanscrit avatara (incarnation of a higher
being). |
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In 1993, Mosaic
became the first widely distributed web browser
(multimedia graphical user interface), to
run on the Windows operating system. It opened
the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed
information services (websites, databases,
etc.) to the general public and began the
modern Web era. |
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In 1994, beginning in Japan, hardware-accelerated
3D and dedicated graphics/polygon processors
began appearing in console games like the
Sega Saturn and Sony
PlayStation (1994 Japan, 1995 U.S.), and
Nintendo’s cartridge based Nintendo
64 (1996). This hardware advance enabled us
to move from planar 2D worlds and 2.5D sprites
to true 3D games. |
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In 1994, Dave Gobel spun Knowledge Adventure
Worlds (renamed Worlds
Inc. in 1995) out of Knowledge
Adventure to create fully navigable 3D
virtual worlds for global users of the internet.
In 1994 KAW created the worlds first avatar-based
3D chat (Worlds Chat). In 1995 Gobel made
Starbright
World, the first broadband virtual world
and one of the first VW therapy applications,
to help hospitalized children overcome their
isolation. This same year Ron Brivitch and
others at KAW developed an internal project
called AlphaWorld, which included limited
property rights, multi-user peer-to-peer construction
tools, drag and drop objects that appear to
all users simultaneously, teleportation, user-authored
worlds, and AI-based bots. AlphaWorld became
Active
Worlds in 1996. The first users immigrated
into AlphaWorld
on June 28, 1995. The public 3D metaverse
begins. |
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In 1996, Nintendo’s, Super
Mario 64 introduced a new era for the
3D platform game genre, allowing players to
creatively explore and interact with a virtual
world in three dimensions without restriction.
This year also saw the first 3D MORPG (multiplayer
online role-playing game) Meridian
59, by Archetype Interactive. Though simple,
this player vs. player (PvP) combat game enjoys
a small, loyal subscription base even today.
In this same year multiplayer online role-playing
games (MORPGs) gain the technical ability
to expand player numbers beyond small groups
(8-16) to very large player numbers (3,000+).
Massively multiplayer online role-playing
games (MMORPGs, "mor-peg's") and
all their social complexities, emerged. |
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In 1997, Ultima
Online (UO) became the first 3D MMORPG.
Ultima saw peak subscribers of 250,000 in
July of 2003. Still has 150,000 subscribers
in June 2005. Also in 1997, Electric Communities
beta tested the fully distributed virtual
world platform EC Habitats. WorldsAway and
The Palace were two other early persistent
worlds that debuted as technical innovations
but business failures during this time. As
Randy
Farmer notes, persistent virtual worlds
without an obvious role playing goal require
significantly more initiative and creativity
from their populace, and business models must
expect them to be much slower to gain traction. |
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In 1999, Nvidia introduced the GeForce
256, the first PC card built around a
GPU (graphics processing unit) a microprocessor
that brought parts of the geometry rendering
pipeline into specialized silicon. Prior to
this, all 3D cards for desktop PCs were simply
aids to the CPU. [9] |
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In 2003, Second
Life debuted, the first 3D persistent
virtual world that allows its users to retain
property rights to the virtual objects they
create in the online economy. After a period
of low initial growth, by May 2006 Second
Life has more than 230,000 downloads to date
(paying no subscription fee) and a transaction
volume (virtual GDP) of US $60M per year.
By Nov 2006 these figures have jumped to 1.7M
downloads and a $220M/year economy (marginal
rate). Though Second Life has no overt goal
unlike a role playing game, the culture and
economy are now sophisticated and lucrative
enough that common physical world goals of
exploration, socialization, and commerce have
become sufficiently rewarding "in world"
for many users. By late 2004 it was clear
to early observers that this was the first
persistent world platform that had made it
"over the hump" into sustainable
exponential growth. While performance, interface,
and technical issues persist, this version
of the metaverse is both a business success
and a great training ground for first generation
virtual creativity. |
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In 2005, Google released Google
Maps, a free web server GIS application
that can be embedded on any website using
the Google API. This same year it also released
Google Earth, a free downloadable virtual
earth simulation based on satellite imagery. |
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In 2006, the Google API was updated to support
geocoding, and Google
SketchUp, a free professional 3D modelling
program, was released. A SketchUp add-on allows
the user to export their 3D model as a .kmz
file into Google Earth, allowing accurate
geo-referencing and accurate placement of
those models in Google Earth. The era of public
annotation of the planet begins. |
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• In 2007, Second Life announced
they would release their complex (and for
newbies, difficult-to-use) VW viewer software
to the open
source community for modification and
customization. As CEO Philip Rosedale says,
"this extends the control Residents
can have over the Second Life experience
and allows a worldwide community to examine,
validate and improve the software’s
sophistication and capabilities.”"
The Second Life platform continues to accelerate
in membership. When we first began tracking
it, accounts doubled from 160,000 to 330,000
accounts in four months (March to July 2006).
Secondary to massive recent media exposure,
the last three doublings have occurred an
average of every two months, to 2.5 million
accounts by Jan 2007. Over US $1M in transactions
occur daily, on average, "in world."
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1B. History - Business and Economics
• In 1994,
the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGS) was formed,
with eight charter members. OGS was the first
private sector organization of companies,
government agencies and universities chartered
to develop public interface specifications
to geo-enable the web. Now with over 310 member
organizations. |
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• In 1997, users of MMOGs
began treating inworld game items as assets
that could be exchanged for real world economic
value. Monetary exchanges of player accounts
and the promise to provide game items to players
in world, began on the new online action website
eBay (named
in Sept 1997). |
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• By the early 2000's,
the cost of creating popular MMOGs numbered
in the millions per project. |
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• In 2001, the economist
Edward
Castronova published the first online
paper analyzing the impact of virtual economies.
He notes that the GDP per capita in EverQuest's
Norrath, the most popular synthetic world
for U.S. players at the time, was four times
higher than that of India and China[3]. |
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• In 2002, Project Entropia
(now Entropia
Universe) launches as the first virtual
world where virtual currency can be exchanged
for US dollars. It was also the first synthetic
world seeking to attract the advertisement
of real world services within the game world.
[1] |
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• In 2005, virtual worlds
commerce was estimated at $30M in the US and
$100M globally. The number of online worlds
was doubling roughly every two years, consistent
with Moore's
law [1]. |
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1C. History - Social, Legal and Other
•
In 1981, Vernor Vinge published True
Names, perhaps the earliest story
to present a fully developed concept of cyberspace
as an alternate world. |
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In 1982, William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace"
in his novelette, Burning Chrome.
The "cyberpunk" genre of science
fiction emerges. |
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In 1985, the term "avatar"
is introduced as the goal of the computer
game Ultima IV (the winner becomes "the
avatar"). In later Ultima releases and
in the online virtual world Habitat (1987)
the avatar is the players on-screen visual
persona. |
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In 1992, Neal Stephenson, in his science fiction
novel Snow
Crash, coined the term "metaverse"
for immersive 3D online worlds, and also popularized
the term "avatar" for 3D simulations
representing the user. Coinciding with the
emergence of the world wide web, Snow
Crash helped many early web users to
begin to perceive the "space behind their
screens" as nothing less than a fundamental
new informational dimension to physical space. |
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In 1995, software developer Bruce Damer (author
of Avatars!
Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the
Internet, 1998), anthropologist Jim
Funaro, and science fiction writer Keith Ferrel
started the Contact
Consortium, a network to serve as a catalyst
and forum for the emerging medium of multi-user
virtual worlds and virtual communities in
cyberspace. |
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In 1997, Doug Crockford wrote but did not
publish "Living
Worlds Considered Harmful", a critique
of the VRML web-based virtual reality community,
which prioritized 3D graphics and standards
over enabling "socialization" (the
development of social communities within worlds).
Adoption of VRML, an early attempt at metaverse
1.0, ceases shortly afterward. Crockford published
this essay for historical value in conjunction
with the Metaverse Roadmap Summit 2006. |
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In 2004, according to the Entertainment
Software Association: [7] -
more than 50% of the US population over the
age of 6 plays video or computer games at
least occasionally. - 43 percent
of game players are women. -
97 percent of games are purchased by adults
over the age of 18 - 60 percent
of parents play games with their children
at least once a month - the
average game player is 29 years of age. |
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In 2004, Marvel Comics sued NCSoft, publisher
of City
of Heroes (CoH), the first major MMOG
based on the superhero comic action genre.
Their suit alleges CoH's powerful character
creation and modification system only allows,
but actively promotes the creation of characters
whose copyrights and trademarks are owned
by Marvel. The suit is settled for undisclosed
terms in 2005, and the issue of physical world
intellectual property infringement by players
in virtual worlds becomes increasingly important. |
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In 2005, in Korea, successful lawsuits have
been conducted against game providers by those
who have lost their virtual items due to game-server
insecurities [1]. |
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The Milestones
Project is an online respository for the
history of advances in data visualzation.
Roughly 1,000 images, 6,000 BC to the present.
Michael Friendly, York U. |
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A brief history
of virtual reality. University of Illinois. |
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A good source for the business, cultural,
and some of the technical history of video
game development is Steven Kent's Ultimate
History of Video Games, 2001. |
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An brief
history of Active Worlds, 1985 to present.
See also "A
Brief History of the Virtual World"
(Bruce Damer Interview, CNET)," 2006 |
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2.
Current Conditions. Important
current conditions in the metaverse industry.
2A. Current Conditions - Technology and
Science
•
Web
2.0 (Participatory Web) technologies,
led by innovative social networks, browsers,
and search platforms, are accelerating the
use of 3D and other rich media. The Participatory
Web is tools and platforms that empower
the user to tag, blog, comment, modify,
augment, select from, rank, and talk back
to the contributions of other users and
the world community. Reputation-based public
wikis, like Wikipedia,
are pioneering examples of participatory
web technology. Open APIs for tagging the
web and tying it to the world, like Google
Maps, are another. Rich media-enabled
social networking sites like MySpace
are another. Another is the open source
Flock
web browser, which encourages RSS aggregation,
automated blog posting, photo sharing, gathering
and indexing of web searches, and other
participatory technologies. In Japan, companies
like GaiaX
have built social networking websites that
allow their users, as one of many community
options, to invite each other to online
games and virtual worlds. This makes the
social network the hub and the virtual worlds
the occasional immersive experience [16].
Today's browsers are just beginning to manage
3D web capabilities (3D graphics, games,
and video). Opera
9, for example, includes "widgets"
that make it easy for users to organize
their online games. The ability to easily
incorporate YouTube
and other video in leading social networking
sites has really improved the stickiness
of online community. Nevertheless, there
is much to be done. We are very early in
collaborative productivity software, like
Writely
(Google's online word processor). We don't
have robust data interchange, rich annotation
(video, etc.), or conversational search.
We don't have good security, privacy, identity,
or reputation. We don't have worldwide ultra-broadband
or wireless connectivity, which greatly
limits efficiency and scope of the collaboration
space. Within 3D spaces, we don't have easy
access to professional digital modelling
tools, or grid computing for data rich simulations.
There is a lot to be done, this is a very
incomplete list. |
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Internet penetration in the US homes in 2006:
42% of Americans have broadband at home. 71%
of "active users" (those going online
at least once a month) have broadband, and
over 85% have dialup or better. 35% of all
internet users post content to the web. [14].
According to Nielsen/NetRatings,
less than half of all Americans (142 million
of 295 million total) were active internet
users in 2004. Countries wth better quality
and more ubiquitous broadband, like Korea,
are likely to have significantly higher percentages. |
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Software and story are today the prime indicators
of success in online virtual worlds. Hardware
(speed, graphical realism) and interface intutiveness
remain important, but they are not the primary
drivers of game success, as originally envisioned
by virtual reality pioneers. Hardware and
interface may be more negative factors, limiting
the size of the market rather than driving
differential success among offerings, at least
in more mature markets. In the history of
the video game industry, market share consistently
accrues to stories that mentally and emotionally
engage the user and are accessible by simple
interfaces. Even virtual worlds like Second
Life, which have deficits in graphical
realism (several generations behind the state
of the art), interface ( a nonintuitive system
requiring real dedication to learn to use)
and traditional story (being entirely user-driven)
nevertheless have a strong niche that caters
to users desiring the freedom to create their
own story, in a framework that encourages
the marketing of their digital creations to
other users. Even for proprietary platforms
(consoles, portables), the quantity and quality
of software titles remains the key market
differentiator [1]. |
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The dominant virtual world story to date is
medieval
fantasy. This is probably because our
primary Western and Eastern cultural mythologies
are fantasies and fables adapted from our
distant past. Though we can expect a broader
range of fiction and nonfiction worlds, medieval
fantasy dominance may be very slow to change. |
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Pluralistic standards. There are many standards
bodies: ISO,
ANSI, W3C,
etc. and many competing standards that find
their own niches. As examples in the 3D Web
space, Microsoft developed Direct3D
as a Windows-proprietary 3D graphics standard,
and OpenGL
(Open Graphics Library) has emerged as
a competing open source standard. Direct3D
currently leads OpenGL in video games (both
have major share), but OpenGL has developed
a clear lead for academic research and scientific
visualization, as well as for non-Microsoft
platforms. A range of open (Scalable
Vector Graphics), semi-open (Java)
and proprietary (Adobe Flash,
Microsoft's DirectX
10, MS Vista's Windows
Presentation Foundation, XAML,
and Dassault and Microsoft's 3D
XML) 3D web enhancement standards are
in competition, and each has taken many years
to develop. Many historical 3D web standards
(VRML,
Microsoft Chrome, Adobe Atmosphere, Shockwave
3D) failed to gain traction, while others
(X3D,
the VRML successor, adopted as an ISO standard
in 2004) have had slow adoption rates and
increasing competition from other open standards
developed by proprietary groups (Microsoft's
DirectX and XAML, Intel’s Universal
3D, others). |
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Independent developers and the open source
community have not yet rallied around an open
metaverse platform, as opposed to proprietary
worlds. Croquet
is a potential candidate, and the OpenSource
Metaverse Project is another even more
recent early effort, but to date none has
received major support in developer time or
funding from the volunteer community. |
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3D desktop prototypes. Sun’s Project
Looking Glass, built on Java 3D, is an
interesting but early attempt to enhance a
primarily 2D desktop by incrementally adding
fast and natural 3D functionality only where
it makes the most sense. Looking Glass is
a mostly 2D environment, but desktop objects
become as manipulable as pieces of paper in
the physical world, with windows, objects,
and tabs that move, zoom, stack, and flip
in a manner that conveys an appealing weight
and physicality. Combined with intuitive mouse
or touch gestures for object manipulation,
such future desktops promise to greatly increase
the ability to manipulate and manage information.
Eliminating any signs of lag/processor overload
for the 3D components, and developing entirely
natural manipulation interfaces (possibly
touch, verbal, or vision driven) are still
significant barriers to be overcome. |
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3D browser prototypes. Companies like 3B,
Browse3D,
and SphereSite
have first generation 3D browsers available.
3B's is the most participatory, allowing users
to pull in pages and graphics from sites like
MySpace and Flicker to create a "personalized
3D space" for others to view, but doesn't
yet include community or avatars. In general,
the 3D browser space presently fails to make
a compelling case. We may need to see useful
3D desktops first, then an extension of this
metaphor into collaborative 3D space and virtual
worlds. |
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Location-based
games (LBG) (also called "locative
games") for mobile phones are now
emerging on GPS-equipped cell phones. In 2004,
GloVentures
demo game RayGun
pushed current GPS technology "to its
limits," updating the players position
once per second and making the player's "next
three steps matter." Mikioshi, a mobile
online games leader, makes Gunslingers
2 a combat-based cell phone LBG played
in Asia. Mogi
is virtual treasure game played with cellphones
and mobile IM in France. Human
Pac-Man was another concept game that
demoed in Singapore in 2004, where the players
used augmented reality goggles to capture
pellets and run from ghosts, just like the
1980's video game. In 2005, Blister Entertainment
launched Swordfish
and Torpedo
Bay as the first US location-based GPS
games. As geospatial
tagging (geotagging or geocoding) begins
to be added to these games, a collaborative
game reality can emerge, directing game play. |
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Creation of 3D worlds from 2D photos and video
is now possible in rudimentary form. Mova's
Contour
is a system for live action volumetric performance
capture in video, mapping the performance
to 3D and eliminating much of the post-production
work in 3D animation. ImageModeler
by Realviz, available for all the major 3D
animation packages, is another such professional
tool (using 2D photos as input). GeoTango's
SilverEye
is a similar product. MVR Summit quote: "It's
getting really easy to measure the world physically
and recreate it using data acquisition. On
this laptop computer my guys at U. Arkansas
flew over the city, wrote a program, and four
hours later had 3,000 real life buildings
virtualized with x, y, and z coordinates.
That process is automated, so we can do that
easier and easier with the demo files and
high-res photos." |
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AI agents continue to make major strides in
computer animation. Massive
Software, started as an AI project for
massive simultaneous character animation for
The
Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003),
has developed a framework to provide each
character a broad range of attributes and
personality traits, and allow them to make
independent decisions based on those traits
and what they encounter in their virtual environment.
In crowd scenes, these characters animate
in a highly realistic fashion. The
Ant Bully (2006) is the first U.S.-produced
film to use the Massive crowd-based computer
graphics, but a score of other films using
Massive's system are in development. Nonplayer
characters (NPCs) in virtual worlds also are
making progress in autonomy and AI, but are
several years away from the scale and sophistication
seen in these feature films. |
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In 2005, roughly 600 million cell phones,
110 million desktop PCs, and 60 million laptop
PCs were being sold globally per year [66].
Cell phones are the most likely platform for
mobile, augmented reality interaction with
geospatial virtual worlds in coming years. |
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IPv6
and next generation internet (Internet2,
etc.). In December 2003 the U.S. Dept. of
Defense announced one of the first large-scale
deployments of IPv6. Adoption of IPv6 since
standardization has been slow, due to such
factors as cost of conversion, operational
conservatism, short term industry outlook,
and difficulty of quantifying the cost of
not converting in competitive markets [68].
IPv6’s mandatory security, (authentication
and non-repudiation), auto-configuration,
multiple options for communication (unicast,
multicast, broadcast, anycast), logical group
indexing for addresses, and 128 bit address
space (10^23 addresses per square meter of
planet surface area) should be sufficient
for all global embedded devices for the foreseeable
future. In 2004 the Chinese launched CERNET2
[67] a competitor to Internet2
in the U.S. and an effort to become leaders
of the next generation internet. IPv6 adoption
will be an enabler of such 3D web advances
as internet television and geospatial platforms,
particularly in the longer run, once people
are using a mobile geospatial web in five
or more years. Likewise, next generation internet
will bring HD videoconferencing, 3D television
and other data-intensive services, possibly
beyond the 10 year horizon for this roadmap. |
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Onset cues are used for realistic motion simulation
in high-end simulators. In orienting to the
world, the human body responds primarily to
"onset cues," inital rapid accelerations
that signify a change in speed or direction.
In combination with vision simulation, a number
of virtual reality simulators (pilot trainers,
combat trainers, etc.) use onset cues to provide
kinesthetic feedback in highly immersive environments
without requiring motion through space. Link's
AH-64 Apache helicopter simulator, which requires
a security clearance to operate, employs such
such powerful onset cues that operators can
get broken noses and bruises from the impact
of virtual missiles, etc. Similar approaches
are used in amusement park rides and simulated
racing. |
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Head
mounted displays (HMDs) and Spatially
Immersive Displays (SIDs) like CAVE
for virtual reality exist, but both technologies
today are used only in niche markets. HMDs
are likely to remain niche applications
for the forseeable future (see Predictions,
Tech and Science). There are many small
HMD makers. eMagin
makes a head-mounted, head-tracking 3D
Visor with a 600 x 800p OLED
display for immersive gaming for $600. Sensics
uses the eMagin displays to make a very
expensive panoramic HMD VR system with 2200
x 1200p per eye for military customers. |
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Physical
Hyperlinks (Physical World Hyperlinks)
are any machine readable identifier (1D and
2D barcodes, RFID tag, image, sound, fingerprint)
that can be resolved by a cell phone to dial
a phone number, start an email, or facilitate
a direct Internet connection. In Japan today,
2D barcodes called QR
("Quick Response") codes, originally
used for inventory management, are now proliferating
on business cards, in magazine ads and product
packaging. QR codes displayed on All Nippon
Airways kiosks now allow cellphone users to
travel with paperless electronic tickets.
On 3G phones with good built-in cameras, even
QR codes on billboards can be resolved by
the camera phone, to play a movie trailer,
provide a coupon code, etc. The current spec
has an alphanumeric data capacity of 4,296
characters. A billboard QR code presently
takes up significant space, but this space
will certainly shrink as cell phone cameras
and processors get better. See picture right,
from "New
Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Cellphone,"
Louise Story, NY Times, 1 Apr 2007. |
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2B. Current Conditions - Business and
Economics
• Real-money
trading (RMT) (also known as virtual asset
trading), the purchase of virtual game items
and virtual currency online, through such
online enterprises as IGE,
MOGS, and
TEKGaming,
is a major global annual business, with the
2005 market size estimated at somewhere between
$200
million and 1.5 billion [13]. Many virtual
world currencies trade at rates higher than
national currencies such as the Korean won
and Chinese yen [1]. Besides blogosphere commentary
on in-game activity, RMT is one of the few
significant feedback systems today between
events in the virtual and real world. Summit
quote: "There is the idea that what happens
in the virtual can be tied to the real world.
The reality is it's only happened a few times,
real-money trade being one of these cross-over
points. And it's not supposed to happen, it's
actually against the rules in most MMOs." |
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• Proliferation of internet
video viewing platforms, and innovative video
content distribution and revenue models. A
number of companies have recently innovated
serving video over the internet to large numbers
of users, setting the stage for the emergence
of true, network-independent internet
television (IPTV). Companies like YouTube
(70 million clips watched daily in July 2006),
Google
Video, Apple
iTunes Video, iFilm,
and MetaCafe
are leading examples. Some are also innovating
new downloading systems, like Metacafe, which
allows regular users to download desired content
to their hard drives automatically at night.
Many are creating new digital rights management
(DRM) systems for distribution of proprietary
content. Apple iTunes Video allows viewing
of reasonably priced content ($2 per network
TV show) on computer or wearable video iPod.
Google's revenue model is the most innovative,
giving 70% of the revenues from paid video
content to the content producer, allowing
independent video producers to go direct-to-internet
with a revenue model far better than they've
ever had before. Google Video is also allowing
the content producer to set the price, another
first. Some of the free user-rated content
is so interesting and tagged to user interests
that it would, if downloaded to a digital
video recorder (DVR) be preferable to
watching regular television in the evening
for some users. One can foresee a great platform
for delivering specialized video content (machinima,
tournaments, etc.) to game players and virtual
world denizens just a few years hence. |
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• Chasing the long tail.
A recent
NYT article [49] noted that Netflix,
the online DVD rental service, with 5 million
subscribers and 60,000 titles, has more than
half (35-40K) of these titles rented out in
any particular day. This suggests a strong
appetite for the "long
tail" [50] of 3D media content, at
least among a subset of consumers, that is
presently not being fulfilled by lowest common
denominator Hollywood video productions, but
is begining to be addressed by new media (Netflix,
internet video) in an increasingly participatory
culture. Netflix's movie recommendation collaborative
filtering system pushes consumers down
the long tail of similar but more obscure
fillms. It is so advanced that, like Amazon's,
it is a competitive advantage. We can expect
simiilar advances in recommendation systems
for social communities within 3D worlds, as
they proliferate. |
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• Virtual
prototyping (VP) is term from computer
aided design (CAD), development, manufacturing,
product lifecycle management (PLM), and quality
assurance circles that involves simulation
and testing of designs prior to manufacture.
Most of this software is proprietary today,
like SimDesigner
by MSC Software, and Noesis
PLM Optimization software, by Noesis Solutions,
both built on the Catia
V5 product development platform of product
lifecycle management (PLM) software leader
Dassault Systems. VP systems "automate
the exploration of the design space",
allowing designers to try different materials
and design parameters, rapidly simulating
the physical and cost characteristics of the
expected result. A few products designed in
today's virtual worlds have already made the
jump to the physical world. Tringo,
a multiplayer game designed and played in
Second Life, has been licensed for "real
world" distribution on the Game
Boy Advance in 2006. This has led some
to forsee virtual worlds potential to become
a low cost and low risk environment for prototyping
physical products and architectures. But perhaps
a more competitive future will be the ability
to run professional CAD/CAM, architecture,
PLM and other simulation software from within
virtual worlds, as specialized creation environments
for those with prototyping interests. |
|
• 3D worlds do not yet
provide a useful work experience for most
people, nor have enough features that integrate
into people's nonvirtual lives. Summit quote:
"If I could go to these worlds and do
something [useful] I'd be there everyday.
But I'm not there just for the social activity.
As soon as they bring in document creation
or start being able to trade real things that
have value outside the virtual environment
I'm in."
Seriosity may be the first company developing
virtual worlds as online collaboration spaces
and workspaces for virtual companies. They
are in stealth mode in 2006. |
|
• Business models are
emerging that allow humans to do piecework
in cyberspace (and with gold farming, even
in virtual worlds), and even to train simple
AI programs. MTurk,
Amazon's automated system for employing humans
in contracts for simple online tasks, launched
in beta in 2006. MTurk supports micropayments
(e.g., a few pennies per task) and the monitoring
of piecework performance via reputation. Boxxet,
a website and set of tools for generating
community-ranked topical interest pages, launched
in 2006. One of Boxxet's innovations is the
use of human web users to train support vector
AI machines to recognize valuable aggregated
content. |
|
• Gold
farmers are individuals who acquire in-game
currency or objects by continually defeating
enemies within online games. This "gold"
is then sold to other players through third
party RMT (real-money trade) websites. Many
farmers work in less developed countries and
sell online to affluent gamers in the more
developed nations. A Dec
2005 NYT article [15] estimated as many
as 100 million people worldwide play interactive
computer games on a monthly basis, that as
many as 100,000 people in China (0.4% of Chinese
gamers) are employed (self employed or in
small businesses) as gold farmers. This latter
number hasn't been independently verified. |
|
• In 2004, Internet penetration
in China was still less than 6% of the urban
population in 2004 [6], yet by that time China
already had the single largest population
of online gamers. This same year Chinese game
companies Shanda and Nexon announced a world
record for simultaneous online play of 700,000
users, playing Crazy
Arcade (BnB), a game where families play
a simple virtual world game as teams against
other families online.[1]. |
|
• In 2005, eBay's
Internet
Games category, hosted $30 million in
trade for goods (virtual items and currency)
that only exist in synthetic worlds [1].
Some (not all) game providers have since
banned virtual asset and currency sales,
driving much of this traffic to third party
sites. |
|
• 2D Avatarized IM and
chat worlds are popular and profitable, more
so than 3D. There is already a healthy business
in 2D virtual world chat spaces, where avatars
navigate 2D space, make friends, participate
in activities, and purchase items. Registration
in such worlds is free but access to activities
and purchase of virtual items (furniture,
etc.) costs real money. Playdo
in Sweden has more than 300,000 registered
members in 2006. Habbo
Hotel in the UK is a similar service.
Coke
Studios (Coca Cola, Inc.) is the most
successful branded 2D world where users trade
music, wander, chat, and collect items for
their 2D "studios." Yahoo IM avatars
can be upgrade with faces, outfits, and backgrounds
for a small fee. These low-latency and efficient
2D worlds are still vastly more popular than
3D, and may remain so for some time. This
is especially evident in the Korean market.
2D virtual worlds like Puzzle
Pirates are presently trying to bring
this formula to the US and Europe. |
|
• While 2D+ social networks
(Cyworld
in Korea, MySpace,
LiveJournal,
many others in the US) have gone mainstream,
3D worlds have yet to do so. While being on
a social network of some type is a prerequisite
to "being cool," using an open-ended
virtual world today (Second Life, There, Project
Entropia) can still have the opposite effect,
positioning you as "out of the mainstream." |
|
• Since many of the legal
liability issues of virtual spaces haven't
been resolved, perhaps only smaller companies,
willing to take calculated risks, can pioneer
the development of virtual worlds at present.
Linden Lab
(creators of Second Life) is a rare example
of a company willing to accept the emergence
of loosely controlled user-generated content
and expression within their world, including
pornographic content on the adult version
of the world, and user mashups involving visual
imagery that is not their own intellectual
property. Summit quote #1: "As an outsider
one of the reasons why Second Life works is
because you've got management who was willing
to take the positions that they've taken on
sex and IP etc. That would seem the rare thing:
finding a management team willing to make
those decisions again." Summit quote
#2: "I was at the Austin
Game Conference talking to a big shot
from Sony Online, he was talking about how
great it was to see SL succeeding... I said
if you like it so much, how come when I play
a Sony game I can't at least upload a coat
of arms to wear on my armor? Nothing else,
just give me that. And he said, 'Oh no we
can't do that because then we'll have Nazis
running around everywhere.'" |
|
• Virtual tourism
is in its infancy. Beginning with interactive
CDs in the 1980s, virtual tourism is slowly
gaining interest. Communities from Geoplace
to the Virtual
Terrain Project exist to promote tools
for constructing the real world in interactive,
3D digital form. The attractiveness of virtual
tourism systems seems today to be a complex
function of hardware (speed and resolution),
design (interface intutiveness), and software
(story appeal and usefulness in connection
to "real world" activities). As
the market develops, software should increasingly
become the key differentiator among competing
VT systems, as we have seen with video games
and online worlds. In coming years, when
we have significantly faster computers,
and can rapidly tour "interactive Los
Angeles" or "interactive Yosemite"
and sample micronarratives before deciding
which of the many possible experiences we
will take in a given day, and when this
platform is integrated into tomorrow's browsers
and today's passive, narrative-driven experiences
like LA
City View or the Travel
Channel, virtual tourism is likely to
be a very compelling activity. |
|
• There is a gap between
advertising dollars spent on television, print,
and other media versus video games. Of $80
billion spent on advertising worldwide, only
10% of is games-related. This is disproportionate
to the time people spend playing, so there
may be room for significant growth in game
advertising revenue. Some believe in-game
advertising can grow significantly, but others
believe such product placement will be too
disruptive to be tolerated in many game environments
(e.g., picture soft drink ads inside a medieval
fantasy game). Nevertheless, there is still
significant room for advertising around the
delivery of the game, as during free downloads
of advertiser-supported game modules. Making
a bet on in-game placement, Microsoft recently
purchased the in-game advertising company,
Massive
Inc. Michael Cassidy of Xfire at E3 2006
said "$15 billion is spent on TV advertising.
Less than 1% today spent on gamers. But 18-34
year old men spend more time playing video
games than watching TV. If you believe in
an efficient market, there's going to be a
huge shift into gamers." |
|
• The AEC (Architecture,
Engineering, and Construction) industry is
a major constituency driving metaverse development.
They see 3D geospatial visualization programs
like Google Earth as major new tools for "location-based
simulation." The US, Europe, and
China are all experimenting with virtual geographic
environments for city planning, building,
construction, modeling. |
|
• Local positioning systems
(LPS), extensions of GPS
tracking systems in use in shipping logistics,
allow the ability to identify and inventory
all objects in a local space, which in turn
can be used to improve the value of 2D and
3D GIS visualizations. Chief among LPS solutions
today are RFID
systems, which integrate microprocessors,
memory, modems, antennas, and power sources
on a piece of silicon the size of grain of
rice to a postage stamp. 3M sells an RFID
Tracking Solution that allows the realtime
location of physical files, and other important
objects throughout the office. Privacy advocates
have major concerns with RFID tracking, which
is both invasive of privacy and not secure,
as the chips can easily be interrogated and
spoofed. Nevertheless, their use for object
tracking, and their ability to feed this data
into visualizations, continues to grow. |
|
• 3D
navigation systems are emerging in Japan
and Europe. 2D navigation systems come preinstalled
on many new cars, boats, and planes, and are
available on portable units for $200-2,000.
Verizon's VZ
Navigator is a cell phone service with
turn-by-turn directions and voice instruction
for $10/month. Honda's
navigation system provides spoken response
to 700 natural language commands. |
|
|
|
|
|
2C. Current Conditions - Social, Legal
and Other
• Dramatic rise of
social networks and social virtual worlds.
While there have been many false starts
and fadeouts (Tribe, Ryze, Yahoo! 360, etc.),
today's leading 2D social networks like
MySpace (94 million users), Xanga
(27 million users), Bebo
(22 million users) and Orkut
(16 million users), etc., have experienced
sustained explosive growth in recent years.
Most focus on the youth demographic, rapid
adopters of new online behavior. MySpace
is now the fourth
most popular English language website,
according to Alexa Internet, adding an astonishing
500,000 new users a week (Jul 2006). Automation
allows these users to be supported by a
company of only 500 employees. MySpace supports
streaming audio and internet video, giving
it limited 3D functionality and making it
very popular with independent musicians
and filmmakers. A number of these communities,
like
Cyworld (18 million users), Habbo Hotel
(7
million users) and Playdo (300,000 users)
also support avatars and the navigation
of 2D social space, making them true "social
worlds." Finally, a few social worlds,
like Second
Life (340,000 users) and There,
offer a fully 3D immersive experience, but
have the slowest acquisition rates, as the
technology overhead and user effort required
for 3D worlds remain higher at present. |
|
• The state of online
and virtual worlds time statistics today
is poor. The BLS's American
Time Use Survey (ATUS) is a major new
undertaking that will give us insights into
actual time use changes from year to year
in American workplaces and households. The
first official 2005 dataset has not yet
been released, but early
datasets have been analyzed in the first
ATUS conference. Various non-ATUS studies
have estimated that Americans spend roughly
35 hours per week either at school or at
their jobs, and another 35 hours a week
in leisure activities. Of this latter 35
they spend roughly 10 hours watching television.
In their small annual phone survey, Harris
Interactive estimated that the average
American spent 9 hours online in 2006, up
from 7 in 1999. Based on the movement of
reading from physical to virtual space,
a 1997 OC&C
Strategy report estimated that by 2010
people would spend more time online than
reading books, magazines, and newspapers
combined. The 2006 ESA Game
Player Data page claims that 50% of
all Americans play video games, and that
the average male game player plays 7.6 hours,
and adult female game player plays 7.4 hours/week.
They also claim that 44% of the most frequent
video game players play online games. Other
studies estimate that youth "heavy
gamers", the top 25% of youth gamers,
mostly male, age 14-17 years of age, spend
on the order of 20-30 hours/week playing
games. ESA claims that women represent about
38% of the total game playing population.
In Korea, where broadband penetration is
greatest, a 2000 study estimated that 80%
of all youth (8-24 years) played games online
at least once a month. |
|
• There is
presently very weak broadband leadership at
the federal level. Despite several Korean
studies linking broadband development with
economic prosperity and social welfare, and
the obvious value of broadband as a platform
for Web 2.0 innovation, there are no government
initiatives to accelerate broadband development
in the United States. President Bush's Technology
Agenda gives only the expected lip
service to broadband development, and
touting minor economic incentives such as
a two year deferment on the planned Internet
Access Tax (hey look, we didn't tax your
access this year!) as examples of progress,
but offers no specific monies, strategy, or
program. |
|
• The rising importance
of “Network
Neutrality” Policies. Lesiglation
and activism that guarantees democratic
access to the network. In August 2005, the
FCC adopted the following guidelines regarding
network neutrality:
1. Consumers are entitled to
access the lawful Internet content of their
choice;
2. Consumers are entitled to
run applications and services of their choice,
subject to the needs of law enforcement;
3. Consumers are entitled to
connect their choice of legal devices that
do not harm the network; and
4. Consumers are entitled to
competition among network providers, application
and service providers, and content providers.
Regulators have increasingly shown willingness
to require broadband providers (cable, DSL,
wireless) to eliminate competitive restrictions
on network usage (e.g., ensuring the consumer
has freedom to run free VoIP programs like
Skype
over telco-run broadband infrastructure,
to set up Wi-Fi extensions on home networks,
etc.). These emerging “network neutrality”
policies bode well for U.S. consumer rights
to run complex 3D applications in coming
years. Even if such applications compete
with existing provider offerings, are bandwidth
intensive and force network upgrade, network
providers have few options to restrict network
usage. |
|
• Transparent cities.
Public surveillance in some cities is already
in an advanced state. In London today, closed-circuit
TV networks take pictures of many drivers
of cars as they enter the city, record and
run their licence plates, and officers check
for major law violators. The network can be
used to visually search for the car and the
pedestrian throughout the city if an arrest
is warranted. Over an afternoon of public
driving and walking, a citizen might be photographed
200 times by the network. As image recognition
improves, such networks will allow a virtual
realtime map of city auto and foot traffic,
a major advance for secure cities. |
|
• The online
pornography industry is now innovating
internet video
on demand (VOD), with downloads burnable
to DVD. Many of these VOD aplications allow
unlimited burns to disk. It is questionable
whether this "multiple-burn policy"
will spread to other content providers, as
pornography is less socially sharable than
other media. Controlling copy count still
seems by far the most prevalent future business
model for providers of most types of proprietary
content, with promotional samples and small
independent material available free on public
download sites. |
|
• A high diversity cost
of current content filters. We want the web
to be an intimate social medium. Yet we also
want it to be one with fine-grained filters
for those who want them, and in this function
it presently fails (pornography, spam, etc.).
Communities and platforms (AOL, etc.) can
provide such filters, but presently in a coarse-grained
manner, that involves a loss of diversity. |
|
• Virtual-physical commerce
and social fusions. Many virtual world businesses
and social activities can’t be easily
partitioned between physical and virtual components.
Consider an e-commerce site, or a virtual
real estate site that has employees in the
physical world, or online social communities
that involve both virtual and physical world
meetups. |
|
• MMOGs like World
of Warcraft (WoW) have been called “the
new golf” (only partially tongue in
cheek) among online gamers because they are
an excuse to get together and talk about real
world life (business, social events) while
engaging in automatic and ritualized behavior.
The "stickiness" of WoW is that
it is a shared experience. You are able to
talk about anything you want while working
your group through a relatively simple arc
of gameplay. |
|
• Online virtual worlds
can already be considered places where social
behavior is "prototyped," and several
social scientists now conduct research on
social behavior in virtual worlds like Second
Life, aided by their superior transparency
to physical space. |
|
• According to The
Economist magazine, China has roughly
30,000 people employed specifically censoring
their domestic websites, but it’s almost
all political censorship, very narrow in scope.
There are at present few signs that this kind
of top-down censorship is significantly impeding
the increasing sophistication and personalization
of either the internet or its web services.
In fact, the Chinese effort shares many features
of failed Soviet centralized information control
programs from the 1950s to 1980’s, a
far simpler era in terms of information management. |
|
• In 2001, 39% of 3,916
respondents to a survey of EverQuest
players said that if they could make enough
money selling things from Norrath [the EverQuest
world] they would quit their current job or
school and make their money there instead
[1]. |
|
• Legal and political
implications of virtual world use are just
beginning to be considered. The reality of
individuals making their livings via work
in virtual economies, most without income
reporting or taxation, is beginning to reach
mainstream awareness. This has recently attracted
attention in the mainstream business media
("My
Virtual Life," Business Week, 2006),
but so far there has been little political
response [17]. Lawyers are already looking
at the virtual worlds space, and a growing
number are very interested in the issues.
The Harvard/NYU/Yale State
of Play conference began the legal education
around this space in 2003. Summit quote: "I
remember in NY when the Internet was getting
to be something, the lawyers were early. It's
interesting that they're early here as well." |
|
• There is very limited
interoperabilty between virtual worlds, for
technical, business, and gameplay reasons.
Summit quote: "We can't just take WoW
and mesh it with SL. Their policies and mechanics
are inherently in conflict." |
|
• The
Nintendo Generation. There is a gamer
generation that is psychologically and culturally
augmented to navigate virtual space and socialize
within and around these environments. This
perspective was persuasively outlined from
the perspective of educational reform in a
National Academies publication, Reinventing
Schools: The Technology is Now! (2000)
[18], and the cultural effects of modern digital
and interactive media recently chronicled
in Steven Johnson's new book, Everything
Bad is Good For You, 2006 [19]. Summit
quote: "Talking about augmentation and
youth and the fact that we adapt [to our technology],
this generation is much more game savvy than
the last one. When you start saying what this
game savviness is, it's really augmentation.
They've learned different patterns for interaction
[with virtual systems]" |
|
• Personal cartography
is emerging. People with time and patience
can create annotations
of their local spaces and journeys using
tools like Google Maps [20], and there is
a mash-up startup that revolves around people
telling their personal travel stories in
sharable cartographic journals. Increasingly
these will maps will also have 3D (video,
3D object, and virtual world) components. |
|
• Serious games and
training simulations have been used for
decades and are seeing increasing use by
the military and other large organizations.
Beginning with the Serious
Games Initiative in 2000, the serious
games community (game-based education
and training occurring outside the traditional
primary and secondary educational software
markets) has grown steadily. SimuLearn's
Virtual
Leader, a corporate workforce training
tool used in a few Fortune 1000 companies
and developed with the budget of a normal
video game, won awards in 2003. America's
Army, a free first-person shooter owned
and distributed by the U.S. government,
has been a very effective, and controversial,
global public relations and recruiting tool.
Summit quote: "Training time has gone
down from the amount of time new recruits
have spent playing first person shooters." |
|
• Most virtual environments
today still socially isolate us, distract
us, and undereducate us more than they empower
us in the physical world. We may still be
in or just leaving Stage 1, the dehumanizing
stage, of John Smart's proposed Three
Stages of Technological Development. Summit
quote: "First generation technologies
are usually net dehumanizing, they have disruptive
social effects, are crude, and don't get the
interface right. The second generation is
ambivalent to humanity, with new benefits
but persistent drawbacks. Third generation
technologies, with luck and repeated feedback,
are usually net humanizing." Let's hope
we can move quickly to later generations of
these very important social technologies. |
|
• First generation exergames,
also known as active video games (AVGs), are
becoming broadly adopted [69]. Konami's Dance
Dance Revolution and imitators are a flagship
exergame. Sony's EyeToy
has a number of exergames, and Nintendo's
Wii
console will be coming out motion controllers
that will bring physical activity to the video
game. Exergames reverse the bias that video
games will continue to contribute to the obesity
epidemic presently seen in all youth in the
developed worlds and many in the emerging
nations. Get
Up Move a site that promotes fitness with
exergames, reports that people have lost weight
and improved school performance by using them. |
|
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|
|
3.
Constants. Important metaverse-relevant
things expected to remain the same (continue as
is) in coming years.
3A. Constants - Technology and Science
• Learning/experience
curve (Henderson's law). This observation,
first quantified for aircraft production
in 1936, and later generalized by Bruce
Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group
in the 1960's, notes that the time and cost
to perform a broad range of technological
tasks decreases exponentially in repeated
trials. More generally, with each doubling
in total production, unit production cost
for a given level of performance or capacity
falls by a predictable and generally constant
percentage. While each particular technology
paradigm will improve on a decaying exponential
curve approaching a fixed performance limit,
ongoing important problems usually elicit
periodic technology shifts, allowing average
capacity doubling times to remain relatively
stable for long periods of time. Most classes
of technology problems show experience curve
price/performance improvements from 10 to
30% with each doubling of production. Most
technologies at the human scale, such as
transportation, eventually saturate, though
they may proceed through many decades of
exponential improvement, through a range
of paradigms, before they do so. By comparison,
technologies at the nanoscale may in theory
continue their exponentiation past the limits
of human systems, as they are driven by
the discovery and implementation of the
unique physics of the nanocosm, not human
creativity, and as informational nanotechnologies
become increasingly autonomous (human-independent)
with time. Experience curves for ICT and
nanotechnology argue that many of the computing
and communication tools available only to
the most powerful corporations today will
be affordable to the poorest global citizens
in coming years. |
|
• Computing growth (Moore's
Law), human-competitive
machine performance (HCMP), and the Technological
Singularity. Beginning in the mid 1960's,
Gordon Moore observed that the price/performance
ratio of computing hardware doubles every
18-24 months. Every 5 years has thus provided
as much as 10X additional computing platform
capacity, and every 15 years as much as 1,000X
additional delivered capacity. This has allowed
successively more computing-intensive performance
thresholds (desktop publishing, 3D graphics,
PDA's etc.) to be crossed for mass market
ICT devices. Ray Kurzweil has extended this
observation back 120 years, charting an initial
doubling rate of 36 months for mechanical
computing devices of the late 1800's. Given
the unique properties of the microcosm, this
growth is widely expected to continue in our
information technology for the forseeable
future, enabling exponentially more immersive
and intelligent virtual worlds with each passing
year. Another Moore's law-dependent constant
we have observed is that increasingly complex
"actions" of human labor and "modules"
of human intelligence, have been achieved
in a human-competitive fashion in our robotic,
automation, and IT systems. A few HCMP objectives
have even been achieved using biologically-inspired,
evolutionary computing strategies [22]. Should
this progressive and modular "machine
takeover" of human physical and intellectual
tasks continue, which is presently the most
reasonable assumption, at some point future
machine performance will achieve generalized
human competitive abilities even in the highest
human functions. This would be a global transition,
or phase change, that technology scholars
and futurists call the "technological
singularity." Many classes of accelerating
technological change have been, in the long
term, a surprisingly constant and inexorable
progression, and they present major opportunities
and challenges for social guidance in the
process. Books like Ray Kurzweil's The
Singularity is Near, 2005 [35] are
commendable early efforts at charting these
developmental trends, yet this phenomenon
remains largely understudied at present. |
|
• Miniaturization growth
and the unreasonable
efficiency of the Microcosm (Kurzweil,
Mead, Smart). Ray Kurzweil has observed that
many technological processes shrink by an
average factor four per linear dimension per
decade. In computing, miniaturization is a
leading contributor to price/performance acceleration.
Semiconductor feature sizes shrink in half
every 5.4 years in two dimensions, doubling
the number of circuits per area every 2.7
years [35,37]. Increasing system integration
capabilities on small scales is another major
contributor. Computing has moved from mechanical,
to electromechanical, to vacuum tubes, to
transistors, to integrated circuits, and integrated
circuits have become
multicore ICs and system-on-a-chip
(SoC) platforms. In the sensor and effector
space we are making a growing variety of microelectromechanical
systems (MEMS), enabling new features.
Carver Mead has long noted the "unreasonable
efficiency" of the microcosm. The smaller
we make our computing systems, the more efficient
they become, often yielding astounding and
"unreasonable" efficiency increases.
John Smart has charted stepwise efficiency/performance
advances of 10,000X, 100,000X, 1,000,000X
and beyond with incremental redesign in microscopic
systems, advances that greatly exceed the
average magnitude of gains we see from system
redesign at the macroscopic scale. As far
as we can see into our extraordinary future
materials scientists and research physicists
expect these new efficiencies to continue
to emerge, driving the miniaturization trend
forward, and making the idea of highly effective
and largely invisible wearable and ubiquitous
computing, sensing, effecting, and communication
systems a likelihood in coming decades. |
|
• Polygon count growth,
motion control point growth, and the Reality
Threshold (Smith). Polygon count generated
by leading video game hardware doubles roughly
every 2 years. Alvy Ray Smith of Microsoft/Pixar
has estimated that the "reality threshold"
(simulations indistinguishable from ordinary
human vision) is 80 million polygons per
frame, and on the order of a million motion
control points on the objects within our
field of view [21]. Microsoft's Xbox
had a peak capacity of 2.1 million polygons
per frame. Xbox
360 peaks at 8.3 million polygons (triangles)
per frame (the PS3 will have only half this,
yet another reason it may be a big setback
for Sony). The faces of the best digital
actors in Toy
Story (1996) had over 100 motion control
points. In Toy
Story 2 (1999) they had over 1,000 motion
control points. If these trends continue,
the reality threshold may as close as eight
years away, in 2014. While the actual transition
might take twice this time (2022), it is
clear that within a relatively short time
our best simulated realities will be indistinguishable
from physical reality. This is a development
with global implications, as it promises
to eliminate the current sensory opportunity
cost of spending extended time in virtual
environments. After this point, we may consider
our best 3D online spaces to be "hyperreal"
(environments with simulation capacity,
and eventually entertainment, education
and productivity capacity, that exceeds
reality). |
|
• Software
algorithmic efficiency and simulation/representation
capacity growth (Kurzweil, Ebrahimi). Algorithmic
efficiency is a vast and technical topic
that is dependent on automation, representation
schemes, processing capacity growth, and
experience curves, among other factors.
Even with "software
bloat," general software efficiency
for many classes of problem has been quoted
by Ray Kurzweil and others as doubling in
price/performance efficiency every six years
[35]. While still a dramatic growth rate,
the doubling period is nevertheless three
to four times slower than Moore's law. As
Touradj Ebrahimi notes [36], algorithmic
efficiency in video compression has doubled
every five years for the last fifteen years.
H.263
video encoding (1995) is twice as good as
H.261
(1990), and H.264/MPEG-4
v10 (2003) is twice as good as MPEG-4
v1 (1998). Further developments will
show if these growth rates continue to hold,
but as we continually learn new ways to
represent, locally store, and generate data,
these growth constants seem a reasonable
expectation for many classes of visual,
sensory, and system simulation. Compression
in portable audio (audio simulation/re-representation)
capacity has grown at a roughly similar
rate. First available in the Diamond Rio
PMP300 in 1998, CD-quality mp3's
(128kbps MPEG-1 layer 3), had a 10X compression
over files in the Pulse
Code Modulation (PCM) based compact
disks that played on Sony's first portable
CD player, the Discman
D-50, in 1984. MPEG-4
AAC audio compression, available on
today's iPod,
offers modest additional compression over
mp3. As Barry Vercoe of MIT notes, future
audio standards are evolving toward a postscript-like,
"structured
audio" description language, which
will allow audio files another 10X compression
over mp3. Today's structured audio is not
yet CD quality, but if the historical growth
rate continues, we may see such a format
used in portable players in 2012. In combination
with storage growth trends, today's 60 GB,
15,000 song iPod will be capable of storing
2.4 million songs in 2014, more than the
entire current song catalogs of today's
leading online sites (iTunes
Music Store, URGE, etc.). With regard
to system simulation, virtual
machines like VMWare,
and such tools as software
defined radio are examples of the representational
capacity in software of a large and ever
growing class of hardware systems. Such
constant performance advances are strong
evidence that not only hardware, but software
will continue its accelerating ability to
deliver simulated reality. |
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• Digital storage
capacity growth (Kryder's
Law) and the Lifelog.
Density of information on digital storage
devices has been doubling every 23 months,
on average, since 1956. This observation
is named after Mark Kryder, a storage research
pioneer. Rapidly increasing storage capacity
has enabled successive thresholds in database
complexity, allowing the mass storage and
manipulation of digital pictures, audio,
video, HD video, etc. One development being
enabled by this is the lifelog, a storage
system that allows persistent global access,
retrieval, and potential sharing of all
past information generated by an individual
user's life experience, in various data
categories (email, websites visited, GPS
coordinates visited, audio, video, etc.).
The mass-accessible lifelog threshold for
email was crossed in 2004 with the advent
of Google
Gmail, which began by offering 1 gigabyte
of free email storage to users. Consistent
with Kryder's law, Gmail adds storage behind
the scenes daily. amd as of June 2006 offers
2.7 GB to their users, a growth rate well
in excess of many user's email needs, including
attachments. 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. The No. 2 telco in Japan, KDDI
Corp, has developed the Lifelog
Pod, software that keeps track of every
user action (photos, searches, MP3 listens,
software runs) made through a cellphone
or computer, extending one's searchable
memory into even the minor details of their
online history [64]. SLStats
is a log program, activated by a watch your
avatar wears in Second Life, that records
simple statistics on the user's in-game
activity. Passively
Multiplayer is a research idea for more
broadly recording and sharing user data
generated in virtual worlds. Having one's
life experiences auto-archived, persistently
available, and only a voice query away is
a threshold with major implications, including
both personal empowerment and the potential
for abuse of privacy, if accessible to others.
We will need new social conventions for
consented recording of public experiences,
but we see nothing that would stop large
fractions of the global population, particularly
youth, from running lifelogs for personal
and trusted network use as computing technology
improves. |
|
• Wired bandwidth growth
(Gilder's law, Nielsen's
law) and the Video
Wall. George Gilder originally observed
in the 1980's that wired bandwidth capacity
was doubling every 6-18 months, apparently
faster than Moore's law. Jakob Nielsen later
amended this observation to note that premium
internet users received new bandwidth at an
annual growth rate of 50%, giving a doubling
rate of 21 months from 1983-1998, a rate slower
than processor capacity growth (Moore's law)
over this same period. Bandwidth growth has
since continued at the 21 month rate, with
the average premium (cable modem) user in
2006 receiving 5
megabits per second of bandwidth, exactly
what Nielsen's
1998 graph predicted a typical premium
user would have in 2005. Projecting this forward
into the next generation bandwidth technology,
fiber to the home, Utah's UTOPIA
initiative is today delivering 30
megabit per second access to 14 lucky
cities in Utah, and will soon offer 100 megabits/second.
At this rate, a two hour video on demand movie
can be downloaded in six minutes [23]. As
fiber to the home rolls out, we can forsee
a world of ubiquitous video on demand, and
the opportunity for Video
Wall emergence, bringing simultaneous
video multicasts with internet video, HD video,
group videoconferencing, 3D worlds, and other
streams to large wall-sized displays in many
rooms of the future home (see Predictions
- Sci-Tech, Video Wall). |
|
•
Wireless bandwidth growth (Cooper's
law). Martin Cooper observed 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.
Frequency, spatial, and code division multiplexing,
modulation techniques, mesh networks, and
now smart antennas are examples of technologies
that have kept wireless bandwidth on this
growth path. Today, CDMA EVDO 1X is available
from Verizon Wireless and Sprint in the
U.S. for $60/month, delivering peak cellular
modem speeds of 2.4
megabits/second in just 1.25 Mhz of
spectrum. This presently allows rapid web
browsing, very light streaming video and
audio to the mobile user, and dedicated
VoIP. EV-DO Revision A, allowing 3.1
megabits per second [24], are scheduled
for commercial release in late 2006 [25].
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 on downlink. 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 (a huge new market,
see: Predictions: Business and Econ) [26]. |
|
• Flat
panel display (FPD) growth (Nishimura's,
Kitihara's and Odawara's laws). From
the U.S.
Display Consortium (USDC) website: "Nishimura's
Law, states that the size of [the glass]
substrate used [and thus the display size
available at the same cost] grows by a factor
of 1.8 every 3 years, i.e., it doubles every
3.6 years, less than half the time IC wafers
take to double in size (7.5 years). Kitihara's
Law describes the evolution of FPD panels.
In each three-year cycle, the average screen
area grows 44 percent, while the power consumption
required for a given function decreases
by 44 percent and panel thickness and weight
is reduced by one-third. The law further
estimates that the number of bits needed
to specify the image on the screen has increased
fourfold every cycle, matching Moore's Law
for ICs. Odawara's Law centers on [desktop
and wall mounted FPD] panel prices, stating
that each doubling in the cumulative area
of flat panels produced results in a cost
reduction of 22 to 23 percent [per area
produced]. The cost of a full-color active
matrix LCD cell-phone display, however,
is expected to remain about six times higher
than would be expected by applying this
theory. This creates a market-entry opportunity
[in the small form factor screens] for AMLCDs
made with polysilicon thin-film transistors,
organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and
electronic paper." Keeping these laws
on track will require alternative technologies
or new materials, or both at some point. |
|
• Battery energy density
growth, cycle life growth, and charge time
reduction, and the Pervasive
Computing threshold. Since batteries
were commercialized 147 years ago we have
seen just two doublings in energy density
(a modest constant of 0.9% capacity growth
per year), three doublings in cycle life
(1.4% improvement/year, and six halvings
in charge time (3% improvement/year). Nevertheless,
after decades of research neglect, recent
attempts to improve the nanostructure of
solid battery technology have yielded dramatic
improvements in cycle life (more than a
2X increase), and charge time (an impressive
15X reduction) in just the last few years.
We can anticipate these significant gains
to increase over the near term, taking us
past a "pervasiveness threshold,"
where our portable electronics will experience
no significant downtime. Figures below are
for commercial cylindrical batteries, cost/cycle
is in 2001 prices [27,28]:
Type |
Energy Density |
Charge Time (80%) |
Cycle Life (80%) |
Cost/Cycle |
Year Sold |
Lead Acid |
40 (30-50) Wh/kg |
12 (8-16) hrs |
250 (200-300) |
$0.10 |
1860 |
NiCd |
62.5 (45-80) |
1 hr |
1500 |
$0.04 |
1899 |
Alkaline |
80 (initially) |
2.5 (2-3 hrs |
1100 (200-2000) |
$0.30 |
1949 |
NiMH |
90 (60-120) |
3 (2-4) hrs |
400 (300-500) |
$0.12 |
1989 |
Li-Ion |
135 (110-160) |
2.5 (2-3) hrs |
750 (500-1000) |
$0.14 |
1991 |
Li-Ion Nanobattery |
150 (est.) |
10 (5-15) mins (est.) |
2000+ (est.) |
$0.20 (est.) |
2007 (est.) |
A123
Systems, an MIT spinoff, is in phase
two multimillion dollar development on nanobattery
they claim is 80% lighter, has 10X longer
cycle life, 5X power gain, and "dramatically
faster" charge time vs. conventional
batteries. Toshiba
has announced a portable nanobattery, expected
commercially in 2008, which recharges 80%
of its power in 60 seconds. This will
allow users of portable and wearable electronics
to recharge while waiting, eliminating one
of the major problems with current portability
of the 3D web. In addition to enabling ubiquitous
portable electronics, nanobatteries will
eventually allow hybrid electric vehicle
owners to recharge their batteries as
fast as they fill their gas tanks, at
fast charge stations like PosiCharge.
With electricity at only 70 cents per gallon
equivalent when drawn in off-peak hours
(roughly twice this cost in peak hours),
these may be deployed privately in coming
years, once the platform matures. |
|
• Network address
density growth (Poor's
Law) and the Transparent
Society. In the early 1990's Robert
Poor observed that spatial network address
density, a measurement of digital connectivity,
doubles every 12 months in urban environments
[29]. This rapid doubling rate, more rapid
than all the growth constants yet discussed
(and not yet independently quantified) has
major implications for the structure of
physical reality and nature of the 3D web.
Taken together with constant growth trends
in miniaturization, processing, storage,
bandwidth, energetics, and sensor and effector
efficiency, this trend makes it reasonable
to assume a coming world of incredible public
and consented private data accessibility,
or
"transparency" in our global digital
networks, as outlined in David Brin's The
Transparent Society, 1998
[30], as well as a very high degree of fidelity
in our digital and visual "mirror worlds,"
as forecast in David Gelernter's Mirror
Worlds, 1993 [31]. The next networking
protocol, IPv6,
already in early deployment, will move us
beyond the present 4.3 billion addresses
of IPv4 (allowing not even one IP address
per person) to 3.4x10^38 addreses, or 50
octillion for each of the 6.5 billion people
alive today, plenty enough to give every
important physical item, no matter how small,
its own connection to the web. This will
enable a world of embedded, ubiquitous,
and pervasive computing, as outlined in
such books as When
Things Start to Think (2000) [4],
Ambient
Findabilty (2005) [32], Geospatial
Matters (2006) [33], and Everyware
(2006) [34]. |
|
• Network value growth
by structure (Sarnoff's, Metcalfe's,
and Reed's
Laws), Social
Networks, and the Participatory
Web. Broadcast pioneer David Sarnoff noted
the value of a broadcast network to the broadcaster
is linearly proportional to the number of
users. Bob Metcalf noted that the total value
of a network to its users grows exponentially,
and may be as high as the square of the total
number of users/nodes (n squared, though the
actual value is probably closer to n
log(n)). David Reed noted that when a
network allows users to form their own self-determined
groups within the network, total value may
grow in proportion to 2^n, a rate greater
than the square of the nodes, as it accounts
for the additional value of the overlapping
subgroups. Taken together, these network theories
dictate a trend toward the "participatory
web:" as the global internet develops,
utility economics will drive it to become
an infrastructure that facilitates social
networks, secondarily an open network, and
only tertiarily a hierarchical network. Even
with today's primitive network we are already
seeing early disruptions and flattening of
the hierarchies, and it is clear we can expect
much more of this in coming years, as the
individual actor is increasingly empowered
relative to the most powerful nodes in the
system. |
|
• Differential learning
curves of Technology, Business, and Society
(Smart). As John Smart and others have observed,
with rare exceptions, culture changes more
slowly than business, and business changes
more slowly than technology. Recall the hyperbole
in Wired
and other leading magazines about the way
the internet was going to imminently revolutionize
both business and culture during the early
"Awe" stage of the internet (mid-to-late
1990's). Only today are web strategies beginning
to broadly revolutionize business, and perhaps
only in another decade or beyond should we
expect them to revolutionize culture, through
the spread of the participatory web, social
networks, internet television, digital democracy,
and collaborative culture. As Brian Arthur
of Santa Fe Institute notes, the first years
of the railroad, telegraph, auto, airplane,
and other disruptive technologies produced
similarly inflated expectations--and investment
bubbles. As Roy Amara of IFTF says (Amara's
law), "we tend to overestimate the
[business and social] effects of a [disruptive]
technology in the short run, and underestimate
the effects in the long run." |
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3B. Constants - Business and Economics
• Information
technology's (IT's) share of GDP and economic
growth and the emerging Metaverse
Sector. In the way it is currently measured
by the Economics
and Statistics Administration (ESA)
of the Department of Commerce, the U.S.
information technology sector (IT hardware,
software, and services, including communications,
both business and consumer) contributed
only 8% to U.S. GDP in 2003 [38]. What's
more, its growth as a percentage of our
total economy is an anemic 3% per year,
a doubling time of 23 years [35]. But even
though the IT sector's total share of the
economy remains low, its marginal contribution
to U.S. productivity is very high, indicating
a structural transition is underway. Between
1997 and 2003, the IT sector's contribution
to marginal GDP growth averaged 40%, and
was as high as 80% in some recessionary
years (Digital
Economy 2003, Table 1.1). IT's
contribution to the productivity of non-IT
sector industries (entertainment, education,
manufacturing, retail, tourism) is not included
here, and must make the total IT figure
substantially higher. This is evidence that
IT, not services, is now the largest marginal
driver of U.S. economic growth. Classic
economic theory charts U.S. economic development
from Resources, to Products, to Services
sectors over time. Structural
change occurs in an economy when GDP
(or for the world, GWP) or employment in
one sector grows to exceed another. We contend
that the emerging IT-based metaverse sector,
economic activity enabled and managed by
our 2D and early 3D digital web (including
not only traditional IT but all digital
media, geospatial web, wireless and participatory
web technologies), will surpass, encompass
and redefine each of the three traditional
economic sectors in coming decades, the
way each have done during their own historical
emergence. Providing plausible indicators
and examples of metaverse sector development
is a major goal of our roadmap. From a marginal
perspective, it is clear this transition
has already taken place. It may take another
generation or two for the metaverse sector,
however liberally defined, to grow to represent
the majority of us GDP or employment, but
the marginal slowdown in traditional economic
sectors, as well as general economic slowdown
during the transition, is already being
charted by leading economists, as with The
Way it Worked and Why it Won't: Structural
Change and the Slowdown of U.S. Economic
Growth, Gordon Bjork's 1999 analysis
of the maturing U.S. economy, as it waits
for the emergence of a global metaverse-enabled
service and automation economy. |
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• The video game market
will continue to grow at a healthy rate for
the foreseeable future, as increasingly global
youth markets are established, as non-players
are targeted by new types of games, and as
gamers encounter a host of new PC, console
and mobile computing platforms and faster
and better networks. PricewaterhouseCoopers
estimates that the worldwide video game market,
a $28 billion industry today, will be $46.5
billion in 2010, an annual growth rate of
11.4%, triple the GDP growth in developed
economies over the same period. Wireless games
will grow the fastest, 28% per year, to $2.3
billion in the U.S. and $4.2 billion in Asia
by 2010 [39]. |
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• Virtual world persistence.
In contrast to game titles, which experience
rapid turnover and obsolescence, synthetic
worlds rarely go away once they achieve
any kind of subscriber base. Familiarity
and community creates unique inertia versus
standalone games. The seven year old Ultima
Online, for example, had 150,000 paying
subscribers in 2006. To this day, no virtual
world has ever been completely shut down
unless the operating company absolutely
forced it to be. Hardcore users keep the
communities alive. Games like Uru
Live, the never-finished online Myst
successor, have been kept alive by the beta
user community. Arthur C. Clarke made this
general observation: "No communication
technology has ever disappeared, but instead
becomes increasingly less important as the
technology horizon widens." Even the
most primitive communication technologies
(semaphore, morse code) remain used by a
subculture interested in history. Increasingly,
such may be the case with any virtual world
that develops a passionate user base, subject
of course to legal and economic hurdles. |
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3C. Constants - Social, Legal and Other
• 2D visual
interfaces will remain a more efficient solution
than 3D for many applications. Read "2D
is Better than 3D," [41] for 3D drawbacks
(increased cognitive overhead, as we are evolutionarily
optimized for 2D interaction at a distance),
and "2D
vs 3D, Implications on Spatial Memory,"
[42] for 3D advantages (better task memory,
as we use 3D up close). Summit quote: "2D
is very powerful. We're going to have a real
hard time getting away from it [for many applications].
It is one of those interesting local maxima.
There's a bigger hill over there [3D interfaces
that include efficient 2D representations,
or perhaps more likely, 2D interfaces that
are tightly integrated with 3D experiences
where most appropriate] but we can't cross
that chasm yet." |
|
• The metaverse is representational.
It has the potential to represent anything:
real world data sets (as in Google Earth,
GIS, and scientific visualization), socially
constructed visions (MySpace,Second Life),
thematic visions (as corporate collaboration
platforms, role playing games, or worlds with
physics unlike our own). It can be educational
or entertaining, political or prosaic. Consistently,
however, it returns to fulfilling basic human
desires. It is first and foremost a social
space, allowing persistent connection, exploration,
innovation, and new ways to fulfill a relatively
constant set of human needs. |
|
• From Janna
Anderson’s research, the key themes
of any communication technology center around
addressing such values as:
- Identity, Reputation, and
Trust
- Security and Privacy
- Connection, Persistence, and
Community
- Ease of Use, Portability,
Interoperability
- Affordability and Value
Each community of users has a threshold
value for each of these that must be met
before a social space will be broadly adopted. |
|
• People will still want
privacy in our publicly transparent future.
How many people want to be on call, available
to their community 24/7? This is always a
small minority, and such individuals are usually
paid well for their time. Technology exists
for our own convenience, not just society’s
convenience. |
|
• Satisfying user needs
with simplicity and dependability is a key
adoption driver for digital solutions. MySpace
was initially ugly vs. Friendster, but it
gave people more of what they really wanted
(an HTML-based
rich media architecture in a simple, easy
to use interface) for the purpose of showing
their personality and creativity to their
friends. Second Life is primitive vs. other
virtual worlds but it is simple enough for
the early adopters (if not the masses) who
want the freedom to make their own spaces
and stories. |
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• The human social environment
that emerges in a virtual world is really
no different from any other human social environment.
The virtual world's features and theme may
look very different, but we bring to it all
our predictable social and legal norms [1]. |
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• There is an ongoing
primal social conflict between hackers
and lawyers (politicians, Hollywood, interest
groups, etc.) in metaverse space. There
is a natural tension between those trying
to set the code free and those trying to gain
IP control over it, or legislate public conduct.
There will always be cultures and tools supporting
each, but polarized positions don't take into
account the necessity of both. |
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4.
Assumptions. Stated or hidden assumptions
with regard to the emerging 3D web.
4A. Assumptions - Technology and Science
• Some interface designers
assume a 3D interface will be more intuitive
or efficient than 2D, but that often isn't
true. 1D (text) and 2D are faster and more
user-friendly for many types of interactions,
both with data and with other people. As usability
gurus like Jakob Nielsen observe ("2D
is better than 3D"), if a particular
information set has 100 dimensions, visualizing
in 3D instead of 2D still leaves 97 that must
be abstracted, but now you are saddled with
the cognitive overhead of a third dimension
to navigate visually and mentally. In other
words, you've gone backwards, which is why
most 3D scientific visualizations are confusing
toys that people don't use. They take away
clarity by comparision to a set of alternative
2D representations, each of which can be rapidly
scanned, that designers like Edward Tufte,
The
Visual Display of Cognitive Information,
1992 [45], find so useful. |
|
• Major
technological development will be a necessity
for mass web collaboration and subsequent
3D web adoption. Many basic features of
the participatory
web have yet to be developed, and there
is a common assumption that we'll need much
better collaboration tools (artistic, scientific,
commercial, and social, etc.) before the
web will become the preferred social medium
over today's dominant communication media,
including face to face. Once that support
exists, some assume that people who find
it most efficient to collaborate on the
web will then gravitate to 3D spaces as
their technology allows, simply because
3D is more intuitive and less isolating
than existing interfaces for some forms
of social interaction and exploration. |
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• Some assume that avatars
will be ubiquitous early in the 3D web, but
the threshold for mass adoption may be very
high. Some think avatars won't make sense
for general use until we can all talk to our
computers verbally, using a primitive conversational
interface. Perhaps only when your avatar-butler
can speak back to you does it make sense to
add the parallel nonverbal communication that
avatar gestures can provide, to increase the
efficiency of verbal communication. Summit
quote: "I'm going to make a generalization.
Unless the metaverse makes solving our existing
problems faster or easier people won't use
it. And this is why I don't believe that avatars
are going to be ubiquitous. They don't make
things easier [at the present time]. Tabbed
browsing makes things faster and easier." |
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• Metaverse designers
commonly assume that extending a real world
metaphor to virtual space is the best way
to interact with computers and other people.
But our fantasy worlds play fast and loose
with the laws of physics, inventing new
rules with less restrictiveness, and even
nonfiction virtual worlds have common features,
such as flying and teleportation that would
be "supernatural" in physical
space. So it might be more accurate to say
that our best virtual virtual worlds seek
to recreate the reality of physical space,
yet to also exceed the limitations of that
reality, in a consistent and intuitive way,
with persistent rules that can be learned
through play, as in physical space. |
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• We assume sufficient
standards, including data transfer protocols,
document formats, and other infrastructure
pieces will emerge to support a rich content
metaverse. |
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4B. Assumptions - Business and Economics
• Metaverse builders
assume an immersive 3D web and more and better
virtual worlds are things people want at the
present time. We assume that new money and
investment will continue to flow into this
sector. Heavy use of virtual worlds is clearly
compelling for a subset of internet users,
some of the time, but we have no idea yet
how large or cosmopolitan this market can
become, or what other competitors to their
use might emerge. Could augmented reality
systems, for example, when they arrive, pull
people out of our virtual worlds and digital
spaces and back into physical space in large
numbers? Will tomorrow's social networks and
AI systems reverse the declining time we presently
spend in real world social interactions, or
will we keep choosing to spend more and more
of our free time "inside boxes, sitting
in front of boxes?" What about when virtual
spaces become so high fidelity that we feel
telepresence
remotely? It's hard to imagine anything powerful
enough to reverse our virtualization trend,
and yet it must eventually stop growing, and
it is a key assumption that it will continue. |
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• We assume the metaverse
(3D enabled web and 3D worlds) will soon be
a highly creative place, with users generating
lots of new content. But how rapidly this
participatory web vision occurs is yet to
be determined. Summit quote #1: "Some
of my assumptions have to do with [content]
generativity. I worry that people look at
WoW, it is an open game in that you can move
around, but it's not so open that you can
make a spaceship or change the physics. The
creativity of the space is limited. Creating
something original in that space is impossible."
Summit quote #2: "We've seen tremendous
growth in the non-generative spaces like EverQuest,
WoW, Legend. These have enormous communities.
By comparison, Second Life-style spaces have
had less growth or less explosive growth.
My feeling is that it's really hard to be
generative in these worlds at present. The
assumption is that people will be more creative
in these spaces. If that assumption is wrong,
then the 10-year forecast [for mass-appeal
Second Life-style metaverse worlds being common
in 2016] could be way off." |
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• Some designers assume
the superior value of an architecture of contiguous
geography in the metaverse, transparently
connecting spaces, versus archipelagos of
loosely linked worlds, as we have today. That
assumption is yet to be validated, and remains
a key uncertainty to metaverse development,
to be tested in the marketplace. What we do
know is that for at least the next few game
development cycles, the bulk of our virtual
worlds will continue to be "walled
gardens" in respect to each other.
That is the most conservative business strategy
at present. |
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• One common but questionable
assumption is that we are converging toward
the emergence of “single sign on”
identities either at the governmental, proprietary,
or NGO levels. But there are major technical
complexities and competitive pressures working
against such projects, and the benefits of
interoperability are small, versus the historical
course of balkanized, pluralistic, competing
standards. Previous unification efforts (e.g.
Microsoft Passport, National ID cards) have
been held with high suspicion and very low
adoption rates. Identity metaguidelines will
emerge (see Kim Cameron’s Seven
Laws of Digital Identity [44]), but are
likely to grow slowly and must compete with
the existing network of abstraction layers
between the user and the world. |
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• With the
exception of virtual world providers who significantly
disrupt, inflate, or otherwise devalue their
world, we assume the social value of virtual
items and currency will be persistent. This,
in combination with the accelerating popularity
of our larger online worlds, allows for the
accumulation of significant physical world
income from virtual world activities. |
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• We assume people will
invest time learning a complex new program
interface as long as the payoff is high enough.
Summit quote: "Millions of people use
WoW. It's complex but they do it because the
payoff is so high. Driving a car is incredibly
complex, but we don't even question learning
because there's so much value." |
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• Many of us assume that
the metaverse is "where the internet
was in the early/mid 90's," that it will
boom soon. Summit quote: "Where it went
from being a very small community of white
nerds who knew each other to being a very
large community with a whole lot of interesting
spaces." |
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• False assumption (myth):
"70% of the network traffic on the internet
is pornography." This mistaken assumption
has been around since a 1995 Time
magazine Cyberporn cover story, but it doesn't
hold up to analysis. Less than half of one
percent of searchable web pages contain hard-core
porn, in Cecil
Adam's 2005 estimate [43]. Music, travel,
shopping, and other subjects take a higher
share of internet traffic. As YouTube and
other internet video sites gain traction,
we should expect relative porn volume to subside
further still. Summit quite: "People
get porned out." |
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4C. Assumptions - Social, Legal and Other
• The metaverse is
a shared social space that needs 3D capacity,
but there are many instances where it will
not be 3D. If we try to define the metaverse
in shorthand as "the 3D web,"
we communicate a mistaken assumption that
the metaverse will be all 3D, or even 3D
most of the time, to most users. But our
most efficient and valuable interfaces for
many types of communication will long remain
1D and 2D abstractions of a 3D world. Using
a row of file cabinets in 3D would for many
be a reduction of efficiency versus a navigating
a 2D filing space. People are drawn to many
2D games, like Tetris or Puzzle Pirates.
Not just for nostalgia, but because the
simplicity is elegant, focusing, and efficient.
2D online collaboration environments, like
WebEx, could continue to be more efficient
than anything we can create in 3D. 3D videoconferencing,
which is easily available in many work environments,
is used today only for special occasions,
such as meetings. It would be too distracting
and disruptive to have on all the time,
unless constant visual collaboration were
necessary. In most cases, certainly in its
early years, we will probably want to keep
Metaversal 3D hidden but available. We’ll
use it only if it doesn’t take too
much of our system’s computing resources,
and adds significant additional value to
the social space. Computing resource load
was a primary reason that VRML,
a 1990’s 3D web protocol, was not
able to scale beyond a small number of early
adopters. More accurately then, we might
refer to the metaverse as "the 3D enhanced
web," and this roadmap is about discovering
and forecasting opportunities and challenges
to some of the enhancement paths. |
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• There is a growing
assumption that we gravitate to 3D spaces
primarily to satisfy our physical world social
instincts, not for cutting edge virtual realism.
If the social content is powerful enough,
and the interface simple enough, we don’t
care that the graphics are primitive. After
a half hour in World of Warcraft or even Second
Life, you feel you are “in” the
space. As a related observation, we note that
cartoons with low graphical resolution are
compelling even for many adults, if the story
is interesting. Some of the benefits of social
spaces are the ability to talk to friends,
trade stories, learn, explore, create, and
engage in economic transactions. In short,
a complex and changing set of motivations. |
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• We assume that there
won't be a significant social backlash to
people spending increasing amounts of time
in virtual spaces, and reorganizing their
lives to do so. Summit quote: "How much
time do we expect people to spend in the metaverse?
When you look at WoW or SL the most interesting
stuff comes from people who are almost living
in the game, and I partly think that's because
these worlds are persistent. If you don't
stay in with your fellow gamers you feel like
they're racing ahead." Even if national
productivity is not significantly enhanced
by virtual worlds in the short term, as long
is it isn't hurt significantly it may be reasonable
to assume that social backlash won't slow
down the spread of the participatory web. |
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• "Universal game
theory" and the promise and limits of
3D games. Some social theorists, philosophers,
economists, and game theorists, like Herbert
Gintis (Moral
Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations
of Cooperation in Economic Life,
2005 [46]) contend that every role humans
engage in, from social roles, to political
roles, to athletic roles, to business roles,
are in fact best understood in the context
of games. All the elaborate social structures
we participate in (stock market, the value
of our fiat currency, custom, tradition, law)
can be formalized as games. If this assumption
is correct, we may also observe why many types
of games are best played primarily in "real
space" today, as opposed to virtual space.
It is tempting to believe that many of our
current virtual cooperative activities (e.g.,
Wikipedia development, online community, etc.)
may better engaged in within the immersive
environment of a 3D virtual world. But such
games will be in competition with our existing
physical world, and our current 1D and 2D
internet communication technologies. In most
cases, given the limitations of today's online
worlds, including their current non-physicality,
we can see why non-virtual games will continue
to outcompete virtual space for most social
games for the forseeable future. At the same
time, synthetic worlds hold the potential,
for some, to be more compelling games than
those we play in the physical world. As we
increasingly spend our time there, there's
a growing responsibility to ensure the rules
are fair, the lessons learned are helpful,
and the result of play is personal empowerment,
not addiction and diminishment. |
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• The Sports
Paradigm may be a good model for the future
of many virtual worlds. Sports are an analog
for life, with clear rules, circumscribed
conflict immediate if temporary resolutions,
highly transparent interactions, swift punishment
of cheaters, and disproportionate economic
and social rewards for the victors. In short,
a perfect place to amplify the lessons learned
in conflict and competition as a social game. |
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• The Frontier
Paradigm is an analogy we assume has strong
applicability to the future of virtual worlds
[1]. History tells us that the initial migration
to geographic frontiers is often led by those
who are less enfranchised in their prior environment
and thus have less to risk and more to gain.
There is an initial period of wild and lawless
experimentation, of seeing what can be done
with new tools and freedoms in the new environment,
followed by eras of increasing acclimatization
and civilization. Diversity and deviant and
mildly antisocial behavior can persist and
even increase in the civilized world, but
the effects of this behavior on the whole
become increasingly circumscribed. You will
know a particular metaverse will have arrived
when it has healthy commercial endeavors,
marketing, taxation, and crime. Currently
there is an early economy (in a few worlds),
and minor crime (griefing, farming). |
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• Unless otherwise informed,
we assume an equivalent permanency, consistency,
and fairness to the virtual world that we
find in the real world. Violation of this
assumption causes very real mental and emotional
effects. |
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• There is an assumption
among some that the people currently at the
helm of metaverse sectors "see the future"
better than others. But without adequate diversity,
repetition, and depth, we may easily be deluding
ourselves with our early forays in metaverse
foresight development. Summit quote: "Our
metaverse concepts [in the current foresight
community] are ethnocentric. Right now it's
a small group of people imposing their thinking
on a culture not yet engaged with these ideas.
Right now it's an early adopter culture with
a lot of geeks in it." Getting beyond
science fiction myths to the real dynamics
is going to take humility, systematic breadth,
and a lot more repetitive publicity, analysis,
and critique. |
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