Blurring the boundary of real and virtual
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.
