Just for once I want to try to write a serious piece like my learned colleagues.  When you have a couple of brainiacs like Jon and Caspar around blogging next to you, most things seem puerile by comparison.  So I was holding out great hope for my final instalment on the future of Second Life.  I have been following my beloved New Scientist's 3 part extravaganza on virtual worlds, having done the good first, the bad and the ugly in one go next and now here is the future - And they start up with the following opening passage:

"You are in a foreign city.  Instead of lugging a guidebook around, you put on a pair of chic glasses.  As you walk down the street, the lenses become semi-transparent monitors that feed you eye with information about the buildings and streets around you..."

What!! You mean the next iteration of virtual worlds will have legions of tourist tentatively stumbling around London with terabits of data streaming past their eyes.  Most of them feeling slightly nauseous as if they have been reading a newspaper too close to their face.

But obviously NS does not allow the ridiculous to run for long and it quickly turns to the real world application of helping people with tunnel vision see with greater panorama.

But this application which will create our ambling tourist is inline with vision of the future that I heard from a Futurologist at BT.   He talked about our personal internet bubbles that will exude from us as we walk down the street, carrying all the data relating to what we want people to know about us. As we walk along our bubble with shake hands with others who share our interest and will ask both bubble owners if they want to connect.  I can see that this will remove the concept of Facebook fatigue.  No longer will every web entity require us to enter yet another profile, probing for something that is a bit more wacky.  Now we can have our profile on display all the time and combine that with our physical appearance, our personality both real and virtual and obviously our avatars, male, female, animal and vegetable!!

In reality I have to confess to being a Second Life cynic.  Not because I don't think that it can form into something of value, but right now I am with the 9 out of 10 people who bounce out because frankly it is full of too many weird things.  But I complete subscribe to Techcrunch's analysis of the life cycle it is going through.  I can see that it is follow a traditional hype cycle (yes Gartner I am referring to your stuff) and it will be valuable once the hype has died (which it is) and we wade through the "trough of disillusionment" - it's a Gartner thing...we get pissed off with things that we thought were great but aren't until we fix what's crap with them.

Metanomics conference will be interesting.  Will for example the concept of Multiverse's private virtual worlds be the answer?  It feels it's a lot better by design, but I still had to laugh at the virtual private bank where your avatar takes out a loan with a banking avatar, slightly nervous that the avatar may be an identity thief all along.  Am I too old or is that specific transaction not one better achieve through a plain old website?

I am away now in a hidden place for a week....a place where the internet has not penetrated!

Comments

There are currently 0 comments about this blog.

Leave a Reply