The World Egg
New worlds, new humanity

I’m not a gamer; my first life seems to be too busy to spend life in a second, virtual world. On the other hand, I am all about communication, connectivity, and information flows - that’s why I was blown away by the internet when I first got onto it in 1994.

I was introduced to the reality of online worlds earlier this year, for work purposes. For a while, I became very excited by the possibilities. I joined Second Life, played around with my avatar, and then… got bored. As plenty of people have already noticed, if you don’t already have somewhere specific to go, then experiences in these virtual worlds can rapidly turn into tedious, aimless, wandering about.

I actually think that online “virtual worlds” are just a phase; they’ll continue to exist, but in many ways they will become more and more closely mapped to reality… What is becoming very interesting is the merging of the real and virtual, where we live in ‘reality plus’, the input from our senses supplemented by a new sense of data flow… I’ll come back to this in a later post, but here are a couple of links of interest…
The Metaverse Roadmap:

The Metaverse is the convergence of 1) virtually-enhanced physical reality and 2) physically persistent virtual space. It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either.There is no single, unified entity called the Metaverse—rather, there are multiple mutually-reinforcing ways in which virtualization and 3D web tools and objects are being embedded everywhere in our environment and becoming persistent features of our lives. These technologies will emerge contingent upon potential benefits, investments, and customer interest, and will be subject to drawbacks and unintended consequences.

The EU is funding a project on wearing a computer at work.

IBM are really adopting virtual worlds enthusiastically.

I’m finding this intriguing - China Recreation District. A project sponsored by the Beijing government (I’m taking this to read the municipal government, rather than the Beijing-based national government) to connect Chinese businesses to the world. Projects like this are nothing new, of course! After all, my first-ever internet job, way back in the early 90s, was at a company working on something similar, funded by the Welsh Development Agency. The scope and ambition of this Chinese effort is something new, though, since they’re buying in an existing and very popular European-developed virtual game world; this is going to be one avenue for us Western consumers to go talk directly to Chinese manufacturers! Very cool; I’m definitely going to have to try to visit these people once I’m in Beijing!

• Introduction
• Press release on creating an e-commerce network to directly connect individual consumers to Chinese manufacturers.
• The CRD as a virtual world
• The basis of the virtual world - Entropia Universe, created by Swedish company Mindark.

I used to be be an avid reader of Dave Pollard’s blog at How to Save the World; somehow, over the past year I kind of dropped out of the habit. Right now, there are 128 articles queued up for me to read in my RSS reader!

Anyone who’s read this blog lately will know that I’ve become increasingly interested in the various virtual worlds out there, as well as in augmented reality, and in the effects it will have on business and society. One element of all this is how we construct our identity in each virtual world, how we manage any differences in what we put into each identity, and how we communicate using one identity with someone who got to know us in another.

Of course this isn’t new: the simple fact that we change anyway over time means that most of us have had the experience of meeting someone we used to know, and realised that perhaps they haven’t changed much but we have. It’s uncomfortable, having someone trying to interact with you as the person you used to be rather than who you are now.

This is likely to become more common as we inhabit more and more ‘worlds’ - and let’s be clear that many of us will live in several different realities at one time! This is what brought me back to Dave Pollard. I forget now which blog it was, but someone wrote a short piece linking to this excellent blog post: Conversation in virtual communities: what happens when you change from one medium of communication to another?

He takes the following channels of communication as his starting point for a very interesting discussion:

1. e-Mail
2. chat/IM
3. chat/IM plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
4. v2v (voice to voice)
5. v2v plus virtual presence (using an avatar)
6. v2v plus virtual presence (using a webcam)
7. f2f (face to face)

Check it out.

A couple of new developments to keep an eye on (pun intended):

• Contact lenses with virtual displays embedded;
• Monkey controls robot’s movement with its thoughts

See also this slightly tongue-in-cheek, but absolutely true all the same, article on 10 ways online gaming will change the future.

It’s very exciting to discover that the day may soon be here when we can grow bespoke replacement organs, using our own cells.

According to the London Times, scientists at the University of Minnesota have chemically stripped cells from a dead animal’s heart. This leaves only the inert protein base structure intact. This can then be used as the base for seeding with fresh, live cells from the patient. At the moment, it’s only been used on animals. However, in the future, we’ll be able to use hearts from cadavers, seed them with stem cells, and pretty rapidly - within weeks - have a functioning heart ready for transplant. It isn’t just hearts, either - almost any organ can be ‘created’ using this procedure.

Of course, the process still needs a real, human heart to provide the base. I suppose that it needn’t be as ‘fresh’ as the hearts currently used for transplant, so by providing a bigger time window between the death of the donor and the time the organ is removed from the cadaver. Also, all issues regarding compatibility and organ rejection become irrelevant.

The scientists who have developed the procedure say that it will be many years before this is ready for use on humans, but I’m not so sure - I think there’s such a huge demand amongst the boomer generation for it that money will be thrown at the problem, and the delivery date will arrive much sooner!