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.

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.