Virtual Worlds..the next WWW?

I've been listening to Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash on my iPod. I've been meaning to read it for some time, but finally bought it and started listening on my last kayaking road trip. I've heard a lot about the Metaverse since I started exploring Second Life and a few other virtual worlds about a year and a half ago. I dropped in this evening on a meeting of the Discovery Education Network, joining the avatars of educators and technologists from across the globe in a virtual auditorium. I dealt with the usual lag, bandwidth issues, and "rezzing" before the presenter's and participants' voice chat kicked in along with the local chat. I browsed the profiles of a dozen or so fellow educators' attractive and sharply dressed avatars, as I watched the slideshow and listened to the voice presentation.

I have a feeling that virtual worlds are about at the point where the World Wide Web was in about 1994..nearly 14 web centuries ago. Dozens of virtual worlds are emerging.. some a glorified chat rooms, others with a cartoonish gaming feel, and others yet that strive for video-realistic 3D immersive virtual reality. It's just a matter of time before virtual 3D worlds are as common and widely accepted as Facebook and YouTube are today, and e-mail was in 1998. Exponential growth rates in bandwidth, processor speed, memory, and display technologies will propel today's concepts of interactive worlds into the tommorow's immersive virtuality.

Disney is already ahead of the curve, marketing to the next demi-generation. Linden lab's Second Life has a median member age of 30-something. Barbie doll avatars give themselves away as over-40's by conversing in complete sentences with proper punctuation. The virtual world growing much faster than Second Life, has a median age of about 12. By the time Club Penguin's cartoonish young avatars reach college age, the typical laptop they'll get at high school graduation will have doubled 6 times. While gasoline may exceed Europe's 2 Euro per liter, a $500 laptop will likely have 64 Gigabytes of RAM, 64 GHz processors, and typical WAN bandwidths between 10 megabits and 1 Gigabit per second. The iPhone sized computer, communicator, publisher, "screasel" could easily sport a wireless, heads-up display embedded in a pair of shades/headset.

As folks like Disney, Google, Adobe, Samsung and other Edu-web-vid-utainement industry players exploit the potential of these tools, virtual worlds, cellular communications, the web, social networks and massively multiplayer gaming will evolve at a rate that will make the dot com boom seem like a bump in the dirt road that was once referred to as the information superhighway.

I hope I can surf in on the massive wave that will sweep into the education world as the new reality reshapes our institutions. If you want a sneak preview, sign up for a SecondLife account, join a bunch of educator groups, and join the in-world SLedCC (Second Life Education Community Conference ) event this September 5-8. Or, you can turn off your computer and TV, and go outside and play. Virtual worlds will be part of our lives soon enough anyway.