Janna Quitney Anderson, assistant professor and director of Internet projects for the School of Communications, was a participant at the Metaverse Roadmap Summit at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., May 4-6. The event was an interdisciplinary gathering of about 40 futurists, technology architects, academics and entrepreneurs.
Participants included Esther Dyson of CNET Networks; online pioneer Randy Farmer, now with Yahoo; Raph Koster, former Sony Online Entertainment chief creative officer; Will Harvey, There.com founder and current IMVU CEO; Jamais Cascio of Open The Future; Julian Lombardi and David Smith of Open Croquet; Sibley Verbeck of Electric Sheep; Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard; and PARC researcher Bob Moore. They met to begin work on a 10-year technology forecast and visioning survey.
Discussion covered a range of topics tied to the future of the 3-D Internet – a virtual- and augmented-reality management environment – including issues of introduction and adoption, positive and negative convergences, migration to and regulation of synthetic worlds, evolutionary computing and display devices, semantic and geospatial web, reputation systems, risk management and failure scenarios.
“Roadmaps” are collaborative foresight projects put together to communicate visions, attract resources from business and government, stimulate investigations and monitor progress. They emphasize uncertainties and challenges as much as preferred futures. They become the inventory of possibilities for a particular field, thus stimulating earlier, more targeted investigations through interdisciplinary networking and teamed pursuit. The best technology roadmaps identify critical technologies, technology gaps and ways to leverage R&D investments toward a visionary objective.
The metaverse is the evolving, virtual-reality-based Internet, and it is exemplified today in the synthetic worlds found in the online communities of role-playing games and in geospatial information systems like Google Earth. Already, the commerce created by the 10 to 20 million people who spend time in synthetic worlds (such as Second Life and EverQuest) amounts to $100 million, and the collective volume of annual trade within these alternate worlds is projected by expert Edward Castronova to be more than $1 billion.
Participants discussed what a day in the life of a citizen of the metaverse – deeply using the 3D web – will be like at its leading edge, as our physical and digital realities continue to converge. Questions included: How soon will it be completely global? What will be the killer apps for Digital Earth? How many of us will still travel to work? Who will develop some of the most popular 3D websites – MetaverseMatch.com? MetaAmazon? MetaBay? MetaverseOS?
The Metaverse Roadmap Project is an effort led by the Acceleration Studies Foundation (www.accelerating.org) to predict the nature, scope and form of the future of the Internet. Discussions and research will be ongoing, ultimately leading to a formal report including additional input by summit participants.
In addition to her work as a summit contributor, Anderson asked participants to record interviews which will be added to Imagining the Internet, the online site devoted to illuminating the future of networked information technology. Imagining the Internet (http://www.elon.edu/predictions) is a project developed by Elon University’s School of Communications with financial assistance from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
To read more about the summit, go to http://www.metaverseroadmap.org
Input on the future of the Metaverse is being shared on an online wiki at http://www.socialtext.net/futuresalon/index.cgi?
metaverse_roadmap_inputs_wiki
CNET reporter Dan Terdiman wrote about the summit, and you can find this story at http://news.com.com/Mapping+a+path+for+the+3D+Web/
2100-1025_3-6069459.html?tag=st.prev
A roundup of Metaverse Roadmap Summit commentary from around the internet from Raph Koster: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/06/
metaverse-roadmap-roundup/ and http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/08/thoughts-on-the-metaverse-summit/