Video: IBM’s virtual Wimbledon in Second Life
“This, then, is how the Metaverse will take shape: through the imaginations of the programmers, merchants, artists, activists, and networkers who are already moving there. If these part-time émigrés from reality want embellishments like running water or six sunsets a day, they'll code their universes that way. The rest of us may smile at their whimsy--but we will take up, and come to depend upon, the serious tools that underlie their play. And if the world we create together is less lonely and less unpredictable than the one we have now, we'll have made a good start.”
These are the concluding words of the excellent article "Second Earth" by Wade Roush, published in the July issue of MIT’s Technology Review. It injects some welcome optimism into the debate about the longevity of virtual worlds, which has so far, at least in the media, been characterized by somewhat extreme viewpoints. After the premature hype around 3D technologies in the 90s (which came to an abrupt end after the dot com crash and the evident lack of supporting, mass-enabling bandwidth), virtual worlds enjoyed a renaissance with the hype about Second Life last year. Now the pendulum has again swung back. Second Life is facing the long expected media backlash (just today Forbes ran a story titled “Sex, Pranks and Reality” about Second Life's swan song), on the heels of voices who have always considered it just another “CB Radio,” in other words a fad which social, cultural, and economic implications were blown far out of proportion. Referring to several companies leaving Second Life disillusioned and “de-hyped,” some foresee the demise of virtual reality in general, and it has become a little bit uncool in conversations with people in the business community to talk about Second Life. Clearly, there’s nothing more passé than a future vision that expired.
And yet, Technology Review dedicates 11 online pages to the 3D-Internet, and rightly so. First of all, it is strong today: Second Life, still by numbers the flagship among the 3D-communities, has 6.9 million registered users and 30,000 to 40,000 residents are online at any moment. And it will be even stronger tomorrow: According to technology research firm Gartner, 80 percent of active Internet users and Fortune 500 companies will participate in Second Life or some competing virtual world by the end of 2011. It is refreshing to read Roush argue that “The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth.” He anticipates “mirror worlds” (a term invented by Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter "to denote geo-graphically accurate, utilitarian software models of real human environments and their workings") to converge with virtual communities such as Second Life or There.com, finally forming the multi-layered, fully convergent "Second Earth" metaverse that Neil Stephenson envisioned. Second Life smells bad but it is not dead. It will have a second life far beyond itself.
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