"The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow"

(Title quote courtesy of ex-Vice President Dan Quayle)

For the last few months, I've been ranging the virtual landscape far and wide, talking with end-users, venture firms, analysts, startups and large technology companies trying to get a bead on where the virtual world industry as a whole is going.  It'd be fair to say that everyone has a different perspective depending on where they entered the industry from (MMOGs, browsers, social networking, enterprise collaboration, training & education, etc.)

Given those conversations, I have drawn a few conclusions, not all of which will be popular.  Also, when you have so many moving parts and players, such as is currently the case in the virtual worlds industry, then you are bound to miss some major market or technology transition.  One of my favorite 'futurecasting' quotes is from the excellent paper "Tackling Tomorrow Today, Alternative Futures and Convergent Technologies of 2020" by the United States National Security Agency. The quote is attributed to Robert Hutchings, the NIC chairman from 2003 to 2005, in his introduction: "As I used to say to my students at Princeton, linear analysis will give you a much-changed caterpillar, but it wont give you a butterfly."  So, with that said, here are some some chrysaline predictions for the future of the next 3-5 years of virtual worlds:

1) Social Networks will go 3D.  This is rather obvious low-hanging fruit, as some existing social networks have already announced either their own 3D environments to talk with friends and groups, and others are busy working on integration with existing virtual worlds.  I think that we'll see the major social networking sites begin with experimenting with existing virtual world platforms, albeit different ones in order to differentiate from one another (sadly for consumers) and eventually migrate to walled self-contained environments once virtual world technology becomes mature enough.

The reason this is so powerful is that you already have millions of people actively using friend finder features as well as other communities of interest in these environments.  You don't/won't need to rebuild these again from scratch in a virtual world.  If they can give you a synchronous way of doing what you have been doing asynchronously (writing on your friend's wall perhaps), it will be a frictionless transition.  Look how easy it was for Facebook to add live chat to that little bar in the lower right corner of your window.

So, 3D worlds (or visualization) becomes a feature or view option on existing 2D social graph platforms.

2) 3D becomes a standard training and education platform by 2012.  This is also a low-hanging fruit sort of prediction, since the majority of initial proof points of this nascent industry emerge from the educational vanguard and people like Tony O'Driscoll at NC State.  The higher-ed market are trying to reach a wider demographic than the local student population, and this technology gives them the best option so far to 'go global' with their programs, especially if you use something vanilla like the MBA Cohort example where the students can talk vertically (teacher to student) as well as horizontally (student to student).

The enterprise training and onboarding people, perpetually under-appreciated but well-funded, will look at what is being done in academia and take the technology by the horns for enterprise training applications.  Fuel costs being what they are......

Who benefits?  Companies like Forterra, Proton Media, Qwaq

3) Rich Visualization for Commerce starts now, hits mainstream by 2010.  There are some websites that already play with QuicktimeVR and other technologies to complement their existing 2D representations of products and similar.  There are obvious benefits to the ability to walk through a hotel room or home for sale (and not just for potential thieves) as part of the selection process, just as there is  for walking into a virtual showroom or browsing the virtual shelves at Amazon (the  previously referenced 'adjacency problem' in bookselling).  We are programmed as a species to look at 3D objects in 3D spaces, so it plays into our biological programming better to not have to translate text into mental images.

Good for Transmutable Ogoglio and similar open web-standards-based platforms.  Bad for walled gardens.  I hope (albeit faintly) that this doesn't result in a plethora of new '3D visualization' plugins into my browser, but we all know that is exactly what is going to happen.  Damn.

4) Enterprise Collaboration stutters along.  Peter Christy and John Katsaros at the Internet Research Group (excellent analyst firm, btw) pinned me against a wall on a concall once upon a time and asked me to elaborate on the differences between WebEx and Notes+SameTime and a 3D immersive office.  Each time I referenced an attribute of the 'virtual office', they  had counter examples of existing technologies (video conferencing, webex, etc.) doing the same job easier and faster.  Well, there is much truth in what they said when you exclude the persistent virtual space use case such as the 'war room' for tiger teams.

In cases where you know all the participants ahead of time, and have a particular task like doing a presentation, then I'd use WebEx or something similar for time + energy expended vs. benefit reasons.  It's a pain in the ass to do a preso in Second Life, which was obviously an afterthought hack into that platform, and seems counter intuitive for business meetings.  I'd rather see the speaker's face to build trust, have the ability to make it an interactive whiteboarding session in addition to the preso, etc. (Strike One)  Ditto for 1:1 events, I'd rather see the other persons non-verbal microfacial cues than marvel at their avatar animation overrides. Non-verbal behavior is a considerable quantity of the signal being communicated at you when you speak with someone, and you lose all of it with an Avatar, even with explicit marionetting. (Strike Two).   Finally, for todays choices, anonymity and role-playing seem like evolutionary genetic detritus from the roots of many serious/social virtual worlds in the MMOG space.  For serious collaboration you need trust, which entails a combination of identity and presence. (Strike three)

Good for non-VW collaborative tool vendors, or anyone who is clever enough to integrate the two together.  I really resonate with the concept of a virtual office for geographically disparate colleagues to socialize and collaborate together in, however until we have a compelling example to show the traditional early adopters of Financial services and academia, this application of VWs will continue to stay in first gear.  We'll see what Qwaq and Intel's joint efforts will do to prove me wrong.

5) Kids worlds and advertising verses are inevitable and already here.  There was an old quote attributed to Jean-Louis Gasse from Apple that went something to the effect of "You can always determine the success of a technology in the degree in which people prostitute it."  Having sat through countless kids/pet world presentations, and the countless versions of how brands will utilize immersive environments to create 'experiences' and create 'vibrant social communities' around something as banal as soft drinks or music labels, it makes me mourn the level that society has sunk to if this is the best we can come up with for such a powerful tool.  Then again, there is an apocryphal quote about Vladimir Zworykin (the Russian inventor of the television who ultimately lost the patent fight with Philo Farnsworth) responding to Pres. Kennedy when commended about his invention, "Really Mr. President, have you watched television lately?"

6) Simulators will heavily leverage VWs for scenario training and other simulations in the next 3-4 years. Look at the work that Leroy Heinrichs and Parvati Dev have done at Stanford SUMMIT using Forterra.  Nuff said, its a gimme.

7) Second Life and it's walled/closed ilk will fade into the sunset in the next 24-36 months.  Sorry folks, and Prok can go ahead and flame me for this, but I don't see the concept of a MMOG sans G being a keeper against integrated-Internet 3D environments like Ogoglio, 3D interfaces on existing or emerging social tools like a Facebook 3D, or custom simulators once datasets are standardized.  Look at the rapid progress towards standards with OpenSim and Sun's Wonderland, and you can tell that walled garden virtual social worlds, even with all the great diversity of experience and creation, are one evolutionary step behind.  Not that they will entirely die, as all MMOGs still live in some form or another (there is still a vibrant community around Ultima Online, which I beta tested around the same time I started at Cisco in 1996) with a hardcore group of citi/denizens  who have so much time invested in that world that the switching costs are insurmountable for them.

My advice to the new Linden CEO?  Make deals with MySpace, Facebook and Beebo to be their 3D environment.

 

8) Virtual economies in non-MMOG virtual worlds will become untenable and go away in 24-36 months as well.  I had a nice interview with a futurist analyst firm working on a government contract this week and I told them that I didn't think that virtual currencies posed a threat for the intelligence community's standard antagonists as the quantities of currency exchanged was so low, and the transactional costs of repatriating the funds so high, it'd be easier to use other mechanisms to launder or exchange money for antisocial activities.  As Reagan said it so succinctly "If it moves, tax it.  If it keeps moving, regulate it.  If it stops moving, subsidize it." If RMT (Real Money Trade) got sizeable enough for anyone to derive any money-laundering value from it, the government would step in and tax the hell out of it.  This has already been threatened by Australia and the UK, and the US has made overtures that it is considering it, which has had the intended effect of chilling any venture money flow to serious/social VW startups whose business models depended on virtual economy float revenue.

There's more, as there always is.  There are some excellent examples of people doing visual aggregation of dispersed functions like IBM's VNOC and Eolus One by Implenia, which also seems like a no-brainer despite the complexity of the platforms they have worked with.  The government uses of this technology for training and simulations of different kinds (what happens if New York City rioted all at once?) that are unfeasible to simulate in any other way are what already supports a rather sizable but quiet community of startups.

Ultimately, I think we'll see 3D virtual worlds become a feature of existing platforms and environments, be it for collaboration, training, simulation, or just socializing.  This will be a good thing in that we'll all be able to reap the benefits of this pervasiveness, and I hope that this assimilation of what is currently a standalone industry into the mainstream will coincide with widespread common identities so we have a unified virtual persona for all of these different applications.

Comments

[Lou DePasquale]

Great comments here and we at InXpo couldn't agree more! We're seeing a lot of interest in our 3D Virtual platform to push out rich-media content while pulling in user-generated conent bringing social networking and collabortation into the Corporate World while keeping T&E down!

[Aaron Sarazan]

Well said-- I have no flames. I'm glad the lack of verbal queues in 3D avatar-based VW's bothers you as much as it does me.

Btw, did the writers of Ironman steal your book of one-liners when they were coming up with Tony Stark's dialogue? Just wondering.

[Randy Sisk]

Christian,
Maybe I too should think about this comment first.
:-)
Some really good stuff here. One could argue that many of these may not be "chrysalis" transformations, but more linear. What are your thoughts on UI's that are transformative, coupled with pervasive display and video technologies that may produce something like a Luna Moth from the catepillar?

[Jimbo]

Very interesting thoughts. Glad to see you back at it after the long absence. Just a small point of clarity - Reagan was commenting on the attitude of the U.S. Government when he said, "If it moves, tax it...". He was not, of course, espousing that sentiment.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, not surprisingly, I disagree with some of your latest premises. It seems to me that you've abandoned "serendipity" -- a feature of Second Life that you once seemed very taken with. What happened? You even seem to cheer it on in your first few paragraphs and discussion of verticality and the ad hoc meetings, but then drop it merely because you can't make a neat presentation (horizontality).

You seem rather hung up on the "trust" issue in this post, too. Is it overstated? Is it incurable except by f2f meetings with bona fide business card exchanges and office visits?

If I've already met people from other offices in my company in real life, let's say, or if there is a kind of "frame" for the corporation that is guided by staff (employee rules, set/setting cues, management of events, etc.) then there shouldn't be this reluctance to use a VW platform where you can't see facial cues. Sure, the avatar and the IMs can be distracting, but they can also be engaging.

I'm currently hacking away at thinking about why it is, if what you say is true and there is no trust without real-lifey facial cues and voice tonality, that people spend very long hours on Second Life (or for that matter the soon-to-die EA-Land and less robust 2-D worlds) and why they form very deep and emotional relationships and have very intense experiences of personal, public, and educational nature. And I'm coming to think that in fact it's about the removal of the buffers of all those evolutionary cues that in fact create acculturated layers over most interactions outside one's RL intimate circle.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/05/emotional-bandw.html

And I think as it has been said before, the 3-D world with avatars, as distinct from conferencing with real live video or online seminars, gives people a chance in fact to use the buffer of the character as a way to manage the experience of having to consume a lot of media or intake a lot of impressions and new relationships -- not only with the obvious interface features like groups, IMs, notecards, inworld chat, etc. but also the ability to immerse for short periods of time, interact with a lot of people, but be able to decouple from them quickly and easily and leave a persona who can still receive communications and objects and who can have land with a display that people can still interact with asynchronously. I think that's important.

You're annoyed that SL is poor for presentations? Well, Christian, why are you still fiddling with boring PowerPoints that dumb down thought and bother your colleagues with huge email attachments?! In SL, you could be representing data in 3D, using animations, builds, interactions, visits to 3-D installations, etc. If you can walk through a hotel, you can walk through a budget! Can you imagine visually walking the staff through the visual representation of their excessive copying or phoning or lunch-expensing lol?! Imagine if the environment adjusted everyday in response to dynamic information from real-world usages, etc.

I think there's a lot still untapped on these sorts of innovations.

Now, as to your notion that all these flat social networks are going to go 3-D. I think the Lindens thought that 2 years ago, too, and that's why they went hustling after ready-made social networks like the Suicide Girls or the Podcasting networks -- and then they flopped big. They flopped because people are in a different mode when on the Internet interacting in flat communications -- it's about all that some people want to give of themselves, after, say, a tiring day at work and that's fine. They don't want to costume up an avatar and fly around and interact with strangers. Some people just don't avatarize well, either -- it's like those who don't hypnotize or can't curl their tongues -- it may turn out to be genetic lol.

People in SL already use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. as a kind of aura or cloud around their SL centrality of avatarhood -- but I don't think it will necessarily work in reverse. That is, sure, some of these networks will make their own virtual meeting places to try to control the data scraping and advertising, especially because the Lindens seem dead-set against allowing anyone to buy ad space on the splash screen or the log-on or sign-up screen or the welcome areas (one of their greatest failures in my view).

One company that seemed to really grow something half-way between a virtual world and Facebook is Screencaster, which enables people to make scenes to express themselves but doesn't involve the obstacles of having to launch a client to navigate a VW.

But you know...There's nothing that shows the actual flimsy nature of all these supposedly robust social graphs on things like Facebook or Twitter when you port them inworld and people sit around and make stupid jokes and then fall silent with nothing to say -- they simply are able to interface better with each other behind the barrier of the flat Internet.

That's not to say that networks that grow out of organic life, a school, a church, a youth club, etc. might not naturally gravitate to 3-D spaces. A lot of acculturation will have to take place before that begins to happen but I think it will. What's interesting is that mobile phones and media exchange through phones is happening instead of anything leading back to the boxed Internet.

Don't forget mobile phones, as they are probably more used by more people for mediation and media consumption than VW spaces.
http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=203