The Metaverse Roadmap

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When you use a virtual Earth to navigate the physical Earth, and your avatar becomes your online agent? What happens is the metaverse.

Taking its name from the immersive virtual world imagined by Neal Stephenson in his visionary novel, Snow Crash, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is the first public ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies, applications, markets, and potential social impacts. Areas of exploration include the convergence of Web applications with networked computer games and virtual worlds, the use of 3D creation and animation tools in virtual environments, digital mapping, artificial life, and the underlying trends in hardware, software, connectivity, business innovation and social adoption that will drive the transformation of the World Wide Web in the coming decade.

The MVR explores multiple pathways to the 3D enhanced web, not a single path to a "3D-only" web. An array of 3D web enhancements are emerging, visual extensions to the participatory web technologies now sweeping the online world.

Social search, the archiving and sharing of our favorite online and real world activities, ideas and experiences, is coming of age and going visual. Wikipedia, with over 4.6 million articles in 200 languages, is now the 20th most-visited website. Social photosharing communities like Flickr bring us into each other's visual lives as never before. Democratic social bookmarking, blogging, and syndicating sites like Digg have grown from 17,000 to 400,000 users in 12 months. Video-enhanced social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo now have over 200 million unique collective users. YouTube, currently the most popular of internet video sites, has 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads per day. New browsers like Flock make blogging, RSS syndication, ranking, sharing, and commenting easier than ever before.

Among social virtual worlds, the 2.5D world Habbo Hotel now has 7 million youth users in 18 countries. The 3D virtual world Second Life has doubled from 160,000 to 330,000 accounts in four months (March to July 2006). The global market for asset trading, object creation, and services rendered in virtual worlds is estimated at anywhere from $200 million to $1.5 billion per year (mostly undocumented and untaxed at present). In Japan, social networking sites like GaiaX entice their users into online games and virtual worlds as just one of many social options. Early location-based games are emerging in Asia.

In the simulation space, virtual humans are being explored for their online educational ability. Virtual prototyping software is making great strides in industry, bringing us closer to an era of Fab Lab prototyping and product hacking/customization. 3D navigation systems are emerging in the automotive market in Japan and Europe. Local-positioning systems, like 3M's RFID Tracking Solution, and modeling advances like ArcGIS, Google Earth, and SketchUp are allowing us to create "mirror world" versions of physical space like never before...


For more info, go to-
http://metaverseroadmap.org/