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Whew. Generating useful ideas about the future of the metaverse turns out to actually be hard work. I was so busy and wiped out yesterday evening after a day of SDForum and two days of the Metaverse Roadmap that I didn’t post anything at 3pointD for the first day in over a month. I’ll try to rectify that now by giving you a wrap of what was tossed around this weekend, though it won’t be easy.

Perhaps the best way to give a picture of what went on is to describe the process. The collection of metaversal thinkers on hand was truly extraordinary. They’re listed in full at the Metaverse Roadmap site, but a few names off the top of my head: Esther Dyson, Randy Farmer, Raph Koster, David Smith, Will Harvey, Betsy Book and Daniel James. The rest of the people in attendance were no less impressive.

Though we only had two days, I do think we generated a number of ideas that couldn’t have been wrung from collaborative effort in a group wiki, listserv, forum or the like. Which is slightly ironic. It turns out the best way to gather ideas about possible future directions and challenges for the metaverse is to meet in person. Personally, I doubt that will change, no matter how powerful the metaverse becomes.

Our work consisted of a series of meeting, most of them in break-out groups, in which we were tasked with generating ideas about possible outcomes, challenges, pitfalls, dangers, needs, desires, pathways, etc., on the metaversal road ahead. Some of the groups were inter-disciplinary, others were more homogeneous. (My badge had a purple star on it, which identified me as a “communicator.”) We brainstormed for an hour or two, then gathered together again to submit our reports. After the first day, Raph Koster complained that there hadn’t been enough arguing, so we all obliged him by challenging some of the conclusions that were on offer.

Some visions of the metaverse 10 years out were quite compelling. People spoke of a “metaworld” in which reams of data were overlaid on the real world around us, accessible via a non-obtrusive PDA-like device, almost an invisible cell phone, made possible by advances in computing power, miniaturization and energy portability. Others envisioned a world in which many more people spent much more time online, wandering from virtual world to virtual world, doing micro-chunked labor in a format that resembled World of Warcraft questing. Google Earth, in one scenario, becomes a source of live news, information and video feeds from almost anywhere on earth, so you can subscribe to political events and have them show up on your desktop or in whatever other display technology you’re using in ten years’ time. (Digital wallpaper, anyone?)

It was deemed highly likely that the law would have reached into virtual worlds by then. Identity management might be stronger as well, so that you might navigate a context-sensitive avatar from one world to another, bringing with you reputation data and other assets, though your virtual form and abilities would change to suit the 3D environment you were entering. And all virtual worlds would be accessed via a near-universal 3D browser (much like Web pages are today). You might even occupy a holographic bot wandering the streets of the real world.

This was definitely some far-out thinking. We also discussed what would be needed to achieve some of these eventualities. (I don’t really want to call them goals, since we discussed undesirable outcomes as well as desirable ones.) Besides leaps in technology, many people saw businesses being incented to build the metaverse and close the digital divide in order to take advantage of cheap virtual labor. The metaverse, it was though, would be an equal partner with the physical world in generating culture and incubating new businesses. But there would need to be a careful balance between innovation and pushing for market adoption, and a need to listen well to the needs of users. And so much more.

Really, it’s impossible to sum all this up in a blog post, in part because there wasn’t really widespread agreement on what was defined by this term, the “metaverse,” or on what it would come to mean. Is it only 3D virtual worlds? Or does it also include mirror worlds like Google Earth? Is it broad enough to encompass an RFID-generated “Internet of things?” Or does it refer only to what we do in non-real spaces? And aren’t all these things simply part of a continuing spectrum that begins at one end with complete disconnectedness and ends at the other with Ray Kurzweil’s singularity.

Thankfully, I’m not charged with answering these questions. That’s the job of the futurists at the Acceleration Studies Foundation, which put the roadmap together. Over the next several months, they’ll collect more data from roadmap attendees and other sources (including the public), then produce a 20-30 page document that will sift all this stuff into some kind of cogent form. The goal here, as I understand it, is not necessarily to predict exactly where the metaverse will end up 10 years from now, but only to mark out some of the waypoints on the road ahead, a few of the obstacles, and some of the things to keep in mind if we want to guide things forward in a way contributors feel is healthy.

It’s an interesting exercise, and I look forward to seeing what the ASF produces. One thing stuck with me throughout the program, though. I realized, at some point, that the people who will really decide what happens in the metaverse were not, in fact, in the room at all. But that was only because most of them are in their pre-teens at the moment. Ten years from now, it will be those people who have the biggest impact on the road ahead. We can barely begin to imagine the new ways they’ll find to occupy virtual space. What we can do is try to prepare the road for them. Hopefully, we started doing something of the sort this weekend.