Tuesday, April 17, 2007

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0?

When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When you use a virtual Earth to navigate the physical Earth, and your avatar becomes your online agent? What happens is the metaverse.

"We are in the early years of an unprecedented transformation in our relationship to information technology. As visual-spatial and linguistic (right brain and left brain) creatures, we use complex visual-spatial and language interfaces to interact with each other. Soon our 2D+ (geospatial, augmented reality, etc.) and 3D online worlds will become as visually and data rich as the physical world. We are also gaining the ability to talk to our computers (as well as type) in increasingly natural human language. These developments will produce profound new individual and collective abilities, as well as new risks to be mitigated."

"We contend the metaverse sector, growing from today's mostly 2D and early 3D digital media (including film, games, geospatial web, television, and wireless), will encompass and redefine each traditional economic sector in coming decades, the way each has done in its own historical emergence. Providing plausible indicators and examples of metaverse sector development is a major goal of our roadmap."

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