It's A Small World After All

I’m having fun spending a couple of days immersed in the metaverse at the Virtual Worlds conference in New York City. I was out in New York for consulting and the company asked me to attend, so suddenly I’m back where everyone knows my name.

Actually, I know about 1/3 of the people here, the same residents, entrepreneurs, and businesses that have been at the bleeding edge of virtual worlds for the last 2 or 3 years. The other 2/3 are new, which is good to see. With over 1200 attendees there is a fair amount of buzz.

Linden and IBM had a pretty exciting announcement about a new, enterprise solution with a portion of Second Life running on machines owned by IBM. This is a great step and one certain to generate additional corporate interest.

However, what really struck me walking around the show was how constrained the virtual world dream has become. There are a bunch of projects that look like less populated and less functional versions of Second Life, usually with some marketing material promising a “safer” or more “corporate” environment. A few other companies are promising rapid and cheap creation of advertising worlds, leveraging outsourced production.

Is this really the Metaverse? Is this even the 3D internet? Isn’t this the same week that we saw Congressional testimony on virtual worlds, on their potential impact on education, community, business, and communication? Technology is just enabling us to take incredibly bold steps, to connect people in entirely new ways. From 3D camera technology to spatialized voice to novel interfaces to mobile to augmented reality, we should be ready to embark on the next exponential curve, building on everything learned from Second Life over the last 8 years.

The future is not a phalanx of walled garden, advertainment worlds constrained by short-term thinking.

I know Linden is going to continue to be bold. I am shocked that none of the competition is.