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3pointD Turns 1: On The Metaverse Ahead

Posted Sunday, April 1st, 2007, at 11:36 pm Eastern by Mark Wallace
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No April Fool’s joke this: 3pointD turned one year old today! It was in the early hours (early minutes, actually) of April 1, 2006, that I posted my first Hello, World! here. Something like 1,400 posts later (can that be? WordPress must be over-counting) and our mission remains the same: “At its most fundamental level, it’s about connecting people in new ways, and about giving them the tools to get more out of not just the Web but out of the real world around them.”

That’s still true, but in the year since then, the 3pointD space (aka the metaverse) has begun to resolve itself a bit — which is perhaps not surprising, since the word didn’t actually mean anything a year ago. What I’ve been trying to describe over the last year is the general direction of the future of connectivity. I still feel, as I wrote last March on my old blog, Walkerings, that “Web 2.0 is over like a hipster neighborhood when The Gap moves in,” and that there’s a new neighborhood to be colonized. That’s of course an overstatement for effect, but I don’t think it’s off the mark. Over the next several (many?) years, the most exciting developments in technology are going to be those that leverage our ever-increasing digital access to places both real and virtual to develop better connections between people in various ways.

The question is, What’s that going to look like? I hate making predictions, but as my birthday present to the blog and its readers, I’ve just spent the evening going out on a limb. You can read the details below or you can jump directly to a brief, fun scenario at the end of the post. Enjoy.

I think we’ll see changes in four main areas:

• Much of broadcast media will evolve to incorporate virtual worlds and geospatial technologies
• The display of information will take on three dimensions where useful, and we’ll find ways to make 3D models and worlds useful in more and more areas
• The physical world will stream digital information directly to mobile devices
• Lifelogging, geospatial technologies and the heightened expressive power of virtual worlds will make possible deeper communication between people

These changes will come on at varying speeds, of course, and in varying degrees, but I’m pretty sure, looking out at the landscape of technology in development, the corporations interested in that technology, and the people who are already using what we’ve got, that those and probably more are on its way. (Bringing game-like feedback systems into non-game contexts, for example, is another change that’s on its way, but it isn’t specifically 3pointD, so I’m not going to address it here.)

My list above more or less turns inside out the list of four metaversal components that came out of the Metaverse Roadmap summit I participated in last spring:

• virtual worlds (i.e., Second Life, World of Warcraft, etc.)
• mirror worlds (Google Earth and/or a multiuser version of a similar application)
• augmented reality (information streamed from physical places via RFID and similar technologies)
• lifelogging (the creation, broadcast and/or storage of personal content)

My list isn’t meant to replace the Roadmap list; in fact, I think they’re only different aspects of the same phenomena. The Roadmap list is broader; my list just attempts to identify some of the nearer-term changes we’re going to see (and that we’re already starting to see, in fact, on a very small scale). Other categories are probably possible and Your Mileage May Vary, etc., but I thought it worth including the Roadmap list here.

All I’ll do in this post is look a bit more closely at some of what may well lie ahead:

Much of broadcast media will evolve to incorporate virtual worlds and geospatial technologies
We’re already seeing this, of course, in virtual worlds like MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach. Just as it’s nearly impossible to have a viable media property today without a parallel Web property, there will eventually be a large class of media properties for which it will be de rigeur to have a VW property attached. This extends to marketing as well as entertainment media, and to geospatial and augmented reality technologies as well as virtual worlds. As more and more people gain easy access to these technologies, more and more brands and media companies will use them to engage audiences. A flat Web page will no longer be enough in a world in which you can offer your audience the chance to participate in their favorite show, or to view and interact with a 3D model of the product they’re considering purchasing.

The display of information will take on three dimensions where useful, and we’ll find ways to make 3D models and worlds useful in more and more areas
Edward Tufte produced one of the most compelling illustrations of how powerful the visual display of quantitive information can be. Adding a third dimension to the display of many datasets will be more powerful still (as well as a fourth: time, in the form of animations). Phear the 3D PowerPoint presentation! (3PowerPointD?) But it won’t stop there. We’ll also see interactable virtual 3D models of physical objects, of people, of buildings, of cities, etc., models we’ll be able to inhabit it avatar form. And from within this virtual cosmos — from the virtual objects, the virtual worlds, the mirror worlds, and from the worlds that are all at once — we’ll be able to extract a range of valuable information I can’t even begin to describe here, about how those things and places work, about how we interact with them, about how we interact with each other, etc., etc.

The physical world will stream digital information directly to mobile devices
Augmented reality. You’ll have access while you’re on the move to a whole range of information that’s only beginning to become apparent. We can already Google for maps, menus, bus schedules, shoe sales and movie times from our mobile phones, but this is a little different. This is a movie trailer that’s beamed to you directly from the movie theater you’re standing in front of. This is the restaurant that tells you whether any of your friends are inside when you walk by. This is the on-ramp itself telling you how congested the freeway is in time for you to decide on an alternate route. This is the gas pump that automatically charges you for filling up your car (with enviro-friendly fuel, natch). This is the kind of ubiquitous computing that knows how much light you need when you’re working on a document on your laptop versus playing a video game on your console. This is an area I’m not feeling very inspired about predictioning in at the moment, but let your imagination run wild.

Lifelogging, geospatial technologies and the heightened expressive power of virtual worlds will make possible deeper communication between people
You didn’t realize MySpace was a Kurzweilian technology, did you? MySpace is generally referred to as a social networking site, but I think of it as more of an identity-creation site; it’s a place where people have begun uploading their personalities to computers. This is the lifelogging piece: We’re now able to quantify and store more and more information about ourselves, and the under-18 generation is more and more interested in doing so. We may not always be interested in publishing this information broadly, but we’ll definitely start to take advantage of new ways to store it locally and to use it to extract new information about ourselves, and to tailor our interactions with the rest of the world. We’ll take advantage of geospatial and mobile technologies (as well as the augmented reality mentioned above) to better connect, much as Dodgeball and some uses of Twitter are beginning to let us. And “presence” — the ability to simulate being in the same place, whether in a 3D world or on a 2D page via an app like me.dium (which lets you “follow” friends from Web page to Web page and chat with them) — will enhance the ways we communicate online, giving us new modes of expression that aren’t generally available to us unless we’re in the same physical place.

Mashup 3pointD
What lies at the intersection of all these things?

Here’s an example. On Twitter earlier this evening, IBM metaverse evangelist and rock star Ian Hughes asked me, “@markwallace another 1 year anniversary, what are we going to be twittering (or next big thing) next year?” My answer: “@epredator: 3D CMS + social site integrator to fluidly present all ur info/content on flat page &/or own-hosted, interoperable 3D space?”

Translation: Ideally, what I’d like to see for starters is a 3D content-management system that allows you to store and access all of your identity information (which I take to include not just the information you use to identify yourself, but also the information you use to express your identity, i.e., everything you self-publish in places like blogs, Flickr, MySpace, Last.fm, etc., as well as automatically logged information about your browsing habits, purchases, tastes and more), and to publish all or part of this on a 2D page and within a 3D virtual space you set up yourself but which is interoperable with everyone else’s 3D spaces by means of a commonly accessed location server or similar central storehouse.

Around the central storehouse, which manages presence and location information and a few other things (with most assets being streamed between peers in some fashion), is built a social network that connects you with your friends in various ways. Your personal information can be sliced and diced and handed out on a limited basis to places like news and commerce sites to better insure you find what you’re looking for (or you can just dive in unfiltered, of course). And you have access to all this information and more while you’re walking around in the street.

That’s probably not coming in a year’s time (I actually think it’s a bit further out; I have friends who’s never even heard of Flickr), but something very much like it will be along eventually. Some aspects of it may differ from the picture painted here (it remains to be seen how much information is stored locally, for instance, and how the streaming of assets is managed). It’s not something that’s meant to replace what we have now, just to enhance it. We’ll still have big virtual worlds to play around in, even if they’re places that have been knit together from the smaller 3D spaces that individuals or groups maintain. The things that make no sense in 3D or are better done in 2D will still be done in 2D. But what we’ll essentially have is a broader and deeper Web that’s blown out into three dimensions in a lot of places and available (at least in some aspects) wherever we go. Then you mix in some of the 3D information display and augmented reality ingredients described above and you’re good to go.

As what’s possible online starts to converge with what’s possible in the physical world, we’ll start to move more fluidly between the two. It’s impossible to describe all the things that will be happening, but as a light example (one that doesn’t take in many of the really interesting but a bit more dry applications that will be possible), imagine this: You can’t meet your friend in person one day, so you stay home and meet them in a 3D virtual replica of the coffee shop down the street from your house. Another friend walking by the physical coffee shop is notified that the two of you are “inside.” He enters, buy a coffee, and joins your meetup via a mobile headset and display. He’s just been reading an interesting article in Business 3pointD, which he uploads to the virtual space (since the RFID chip in the magazine features an interactive model of a new shopping robot), and the three of you mess around with that for a while. The guy in the coffee shop bumps into a friend (no technology required), so he leaves the two of you, who, because you’re using your wireless keyboards and Wii interfaces to navigate the virtual world on huge flatscreens, turn on a television show — which consists of you joining a few thousand other metaversonauts in a fight against the computerized zombie hordes, while a viewing audience of millions tunes in to various teams and votes them special powers or tougher zombie enemies, as the case may be. Later in the evening you log off and ask for any blog posts you might be interested in. Unsurprisingly, you get a list that now includes a few posts on robots, on shopping, on business, and on zombies. You bookmark a couple that your friends have found useful, and then you access the video of your fight against the zombies, clicking directly to the moment when your team started to get the most votes. You clip that out, tag it, upload it to your home page, link it semantically to a few of your friends’ videos, and archive the original video because you’re thinking of switching jobs and you want to be able to demonstrate your leadership skills to a prospective employer. Your husband comes home, the two of you cook dinner, you eat and talk, then you go to bed.

Welcome to the metaverse.

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