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 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.

Yes, another title to tease you into reading, promising more than it can deliver. I’m at that head-shaking point where I can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen.In an interview about his latest novel, novelist William Gibson points out that writing science fiction is getting harder, because:

we can’t culturally have futures the way that we used to have futures because we don’t have a present in the sense that we used to have a present. Things are moving too quickly for us to have a present to stand on from which we can say, “oh, the future, it’s over there and it looks like this.”

Here’s the perfect example:

Neurosky, a company that will let us interact with games (and tools, and machinery, and robots, and cellphones…) just by controlling our mental state, blinking, and so on through a device that will be on the market next year - and should only add $15 to the price… Incredible… who thought it would come so soon? And look at how portable the device is! Combine this with the kind of augmented reality I was talking about the other day, and we will soon be seeing some wild stuff happening out there on the streets! Are we ready for this, I wonder…? I also wonder: when will they go to IPO….?

Here’s that augmented reality clip again: watch this back-to-back with the above, and imagine the possibilities when they’re combined….

Update:

My word, and those 3-d avatars of yourself that I mentioned in that earlier post… hehehe, I should have known: they’re going to be on the market later this year!