"What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When you use a virtual Earth to navigate the physical Earth, and your avatar becomes your online agent? What happens is the metaverse."
The Metaverse Roadmap is a collaborative forecast, survey and research project on emerging 3D Web technologies and implications. They have released the Metaverse Roadmap Overview (pdf), a 23-page glimpse at four envisioned scenarios.
The authors distinguish two continua, Augmentation-Simulation and External-Intimate. The first refers to Augmented Reality vs. Virtual Reality, and the latter refers to whether each is applied more to public environment or to the person and belongings. From these they construct four scenarios: Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality, and Lifelogging. These are what they sound like, and the authors go into some detail about each. Additionally they address the overlap of these, and discuss cross-scenario issues.
Hats off to Jamais Cascio, Jerry Paffendorf and John Smart and the other contributors for putting this together! I look forward to reading the Inputs and other documents.
In related news, Tech Insider posts about Sentient World Simulation, a project by Simulex, Inc. This company makes mass behavior modeling products for the military, government and corporations. This particular project is a classic Mirror World, taking realtime inputs from the internet and news articles to calibrate an accurate base state of the simulation. Call it the mirror world if you want, but to me it sounds like a big game of The Sims. I'd like to see some studies done with this software, on what factors make social modeling easier or harder.
0 comments:
Post a Comment