Apoc Week 13 - The Future of Virtual Worlds
This week was the 7th, and final, of my Annenberg faculty lectures. It was by far the most challenging and most fun of the lectures to put together. A look into the future. My guesses as to where this all is going. While I posted some of my early thoughts on Monday, the full talk goes quite a bit further.
The trends fit together rather nicely, I think, and expose some of the false dichotomies that currently limit our thinking. Rich, always-on, networked, wearable sensors are a natural extension of Bluetooth headsets, combined with cracking the mobile display challenge, mean that divisions between “mirror world” and “fantasy world” or “life logging” and “game” crumble. Accurate location and pointing information in a head-mounted display combined with crowdsourcing and filtering makes augmented, blended, and alternate realities basic parts of communication, collaboration, work, and play.
This is going to happen.
It’s only a matter of whether Microsoft, Nokia, Google, or some startup is going to demonstrate it first.