Thoughts from the Front Edge of the Metaverse
Serendipity is great! Today I had a reason to go back and search for a video I had saved in my favorites on YouTube, and completely by accident I came across a great set of video interviews by Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab from the Metaverse U conference at Stanford University last February. You have to tune out all the background noise…the interviews were obviously taped on breaks between sessions…but the content and the insights you can get from the 40+ talks is considerable. All the virtual worlds you’ve heard of, plus some you haven’t, are represented, like Second Life, Multiverse, Wonderland, Metaversum, Ogoglio, BigWorld, Twinity, TomorrowSpace, Transmutable, and Metaplace, as well as Stanford academics who hosted the program and other thought leaders and pioneers, like Jerry Paffendorf, Ren Reynolds, Rob Bloomfield, Mitch Wagner, Daniel Terdiman, Raph Koster, and John Perry Barlow.
The interviewer asks the same four questions of each person, and here is a sampling of the responses. Some discussion threads are clearly starting to emerge.
1. What excites you about current metaverse technology?
“Interaction increasing between virtual worlds and current social networking sites”
“Having a persistent identity that you take with you as a person through all the different technologies and social networks and real places you go…the ability to turn your life into a story.”
“Notion of using metaverse technology to enhance social networking technology–the intersection of the two.”
“How all these technologies will compete and cooperate. How all these rich data streams will be knitted together in the next few years.”
“There is still so much potential! We are just scratching the surface with virtual world technologies.”
“The ability to simulate presence.”
“We are moving to web based platforms, away from a lot of proprietary systems, which will spawn a lot of niche applications that will show us what these platforms are really valuable for.”
“The potential for information manipulation and how we make things intuitive to people.”
“The technology itself is not exciting, it’s more the combination of it with the availability of PCs and broadband networks. It’s available to a wider number of people.”
“The fact that hundreds of thousands of people are out there trading goods and services and seeing how it will ultimately be regulated.”
“The influx of creativity and innovation by participants who are inventing things that haven’t been invented before.”
“The ability to bring a group from around the world together.”
“Connecting humans with humans and seeing how they interact with each other.”
“We are at the beginning of the time when all the bits and pieces are coming together and we are starting to get a road map of where it is all headed.”
“Currently, not as much as what is right around the corner — we are seeing a lot of people bringing the Web to virtual technologies and virtual worlds to the Web.”
“The current Internet is a “go-to” Internet. Virtual worlds bring the content to you, in a way that enhances your everyday experiences.”
“So much interest and so many people thinking about it right now.”
“How quickly we can build tools to create 3D annotations to real world locations.”
“It’s more accessible now, and slowly getting to the masses, rather than remaining just a geek hobby.”
2. What concerns you most about current metaverse technology?
“Nothing really works together right now.”
“Cultural issues…government getting in and taxing virtual goods, etc. I hope it’s later rather than sooner.
“Hype has set the expections of virtual worlds so high that we have to get past that. The limitations of one virtual world don’t mean that the medium is flawed.”
“The digital divide. How rapidly will the technologies be adopted outside the developed world.”
“It could all get killed very young…from the standpoint of legal regulations, real world laws, restrictions and taxes that none of us want to deal with but we all know that they eventually have to be dealt with.”
“Who has access to what sort of data. It will be 100 years before we can sort out the implications to privacy.”
“We are dealing with really fundamental human aspects like body language and friendship, so we have to be careful.”
“Lack of interoperability and standards. People are so excited about it that they aren’t really looking at it objectively. We haven’t found the killer app for virtual worlds yet. Just doing what we already do better is not going to create the metaverse. It’s more than that.”
“Virtual spaces are becoming important to people and the nature of the interactions that are going on means we need to be having discourse in a legal sense about the things we are doing there.”
“We don’t know how to regulate virtual commerce and contracts.”
“It’s still early in the technology maturation cycle, so there are a lot of things that don’t work well, aren’t standardized, etc. I worry about premature closure as a result.”
“Privacy issues.”
“There’s a confusion between the emergence of standards and the effort to create standards. It’s better to have standards emerge from use.”
“A lot of chaos and lack of a road map for where we are headed with metaverse technologies. Other than the simpler tools for kids, it’s a world of painful compromise. Demand is high, but it’s painful for people trying to build the end-user applications.”
“The big iron or development solution is perfectly viable for most solutions. To what degree will we migrate to new technology patterns, given that a lot of the business cases don’t necessarily call for it. To what degree will we break out of established paradigms.”
“There are a lot of unanswered questions. There are social and international implications, cross-cultural barrier, and everyone comes in with certain expectations about what it means. It’s difficult to prioritize what should be solved first.”
“So much in virtual worlds came from the gaming space that we think of virtual worlds as another automonous space. Instead of starting with 3D visualization technology and social spaces and overlaying them over all the people who use the Internet and trying to figure out how they work together, we started from the assumption that we have to go someplace different from our normal work environments.”
“Transparency of personal data.”
“Platforms that are proprietary and not distributed; many are just c**p right now, and even the companies who provide them will say so.”
“Making it more mainstream, so it will compete with TV and radio and other channels.”
3. What will be the most surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
“Mirror world technologies. When you can lay other kinds of data on top of something like Google Maps and drill down into the life of a real person. Not in a spooky, stalker kind of way!”
“How deeply it will be integrated into our lives and how quickly it becomes so.”
“Privacy…where is the line in the sand between public and private, and how do you stratify the data so that everyone doesn’t have access to all information. How can information be tailored and give the user an element of control.”
“A decade is a long time! How much it’s used in day to day work environments. And how the generation that has grown up with it brings the tools they are used to interacting with daily into the work environment with them. It will be a full scale shift of both the work space and social space.”
“The need for people to be connected at all times will increase. You can see it now in young people who have to be away from their IMs and web browsers. Virtual worlds will tighten the connections between people.”
“How much time we actually spend in virtual worlds and using other kinds of applications.”
“We will find that there are things we can do in those environments that can’t be done in the real environment, once we find the killer app.”
“How ordinary it will become. It’s likely to morph so that being in a virtual environment will be as ordinary as using email. It just won’t matter whether you are in a virtual world or not.”
“Education is a perfect fit for virtual worlds, so this will be a fascinating direction.”
“It will become profoundly ordinary to spend some portion of the day in the metaverse, in the same way we do with the Web now.”
“It will change the classroom and the way we learn completely.”
“How much cool stuff it will do and how much it will tell others. The incentives or convenience tradeoff is going to be a revenue model that will result in loss of privacy.”
“The international societal impact. Taking global, governmental and corporate transactions that are complex, and having them on a person to person basis.”
“Having it pop up in places we don’t expect, like augmented reality, computer aided design, and product design, shopping, etc. The distinction between the virtual and real worlds will become more blurred, and that is where a lot of the real surprises will come from.”
“It will become ubiquitous and everywhere in our daily lives, seamlessly integrated. That would be a pleasant surprise and output of the metaverse concept.”
“It will become a great geographic flattener. We will see a lot more “tribal behavior” with people forming more around communities of interest.”
“A social transformation that leads to a much healthier society that cares for itself and individuals in a much more benign way. I don’t forecast that…it would surprise me.”
“Mobile. Mobile handsets will provide more accessibility. We need tools that can be built into a set of eyeglasses so you can interact with your items in the virtual world or in the real world. Integratable technologies. There are companies moving this direction.”
4. What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?
“That’s hard to say because I’m constantly amazed with the technology and the possibilities.”
“Touch and smell…but perhaps one day we can simulate that, too!”
“Limits of the human brain.”
“I don’t know any. There are some cultural barriers that will keep users from using virtual worlds in really crazy ways, but I don’t know any challenges that can’t be overcome in the next few decades.”
“The ability to catalog/mine/manage/interrogate the huge volume of information to get to context relevant information.”
“Body language. It’s difficult to replicate. The unspoken cues in communication.”
“The scent of smell. A lot of our memories are triggered by smell. It’s subtle. We can simulate tactile, auditory and visual feedback, but not taste and smell.”
“Proprietary software — walled gardens and companies that keep their knowledge to themselves.”
“One of the biggest is that semi-sensory input is still needed. Using things like headsets that are sort of in the real world and sort of in the virtual world is inelegant, and there doesn’t yet seem to be a way to overcome it.”
“Some of the barriers are just differences in experience. There’s not a simple set of norms for what is good and what is not good about virtual worlds, but there will always be a barrier of the need for personal control over our own data.”
“The hardware and connectivity costs. In broad based education and commerce, we need it to be available to people who are economically, physically and geographically disadvantaged.”
“There’s something about being in the live presence of another human being that we will simulate and get closer to, but we will still want to touch live skin from time to time.”
“The subtle person-to-person contact and energy we get when we stand next to each other and share conversation.”
“Privacy in exchange for profit and entertainment.”
“The peace and quiet, the atmosphere offered by the real world.”
“People have to want to use it and deal with the kind of identity and privacy issues it poses. They are endemic to the medium.”
“It will difficult to account for all of the unknowns, and hard to prioritize. Making mistakes is a great way to improve, but it’s easy to get frustrate with failures. There’s a big evolution to occur, and we won’t be able to get around some of the barriers.”
“There’s an evolutionary bias toward building trust from non-verbal behaviors that we have as a species, and there is suspicion that we will lose some of that in virtual worlds. We won’t be able to fake that out with technology, so we will still need the face to face interaction occasionally in order to create the bonds of trust that occur in the real world where the subtle signals can be read.”
“The sensory experience of the real world is approachable, but we will never be able to simulate the true richness of a real world experience.”
“To make it a really natural, organic experience. Without that the uptake will be low and people will not be able to treat it like a natural space.”
