Stephenson's Metaverse is a 3D digital virtual world where users, represented by their avatars, can meet and interact just like they do in the physical world. Instead of building websites like in today's Internet, Metaverse developers build fully 3D virtual spaces (scapes) which can closely mimic the physical world, or be as different from the "real world" as the imagination of the developers permits. For example, in the Metaverse you can visit an accurate replica of a real city, a future imaginary space settlement on Mars, a microscale world where you can see individual molecules and cells, etc.
A few years after writing Snow Crash, Stephenson said that his vision had not emerged in reality. This may have been a premature statement, as in 2006 we can see a growing number of operational implementations, with popular "events" taking place in a Metaverse, and an emergent economy consolidating. The most popular Metaverse implementation (2006) is Second Life, developed and operated by Linden lab.
The popular online gaming magazine Gamasutra has an article on a keynote for the Serious Games Summit, which deals with game development in the areas of education, government, health, military, science, and corporate training. In it, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, in a talk named 'You Can (Not) Be Serious' offered some fascinating opinions, both on the future of virtual worlds and the way in which his own company's efforts are helping to stretch boundaries. Interesting comment on the value of VR as interface to information: "if you were trying to recall the latest three files accessed in your 'My Documents' directory, you probably can't remember them, but you can remember a list of the items in your kitchen, most likely. This is because you've been building a space in your mind three dimensionally, and storing information in it".
In other words, 3D is a much better user interface. This is not surprising: while we have been working with documents for only a few hundreds of years, we have evolved fast responses to the real 3D universe, like running from predators and hunting prey, for hundreds of thousands of years. Now that technology permits doing so, 3D VR will become the preferred online interface for users with powerful PCs and enough bandwidth. Nothing exceptional though: your home PC and DSL are probably more than good enough to run Second Life.
In the fast growing "real" virtual economy of Second Life you can buy land, real estate, products and services with "Linden dollars". There are exchanges where you can buy and sell Linden dollars, so the virtual currency behaves like just another foreign currency in many respects. As it is very easy to make or receive a payment in Linden dollars, an option for electronic commerce is selling in Linden dollars and then converting the income to real money. There are already innovative businesses selling RL (shorthand used by SL residents for "Real Life") products and services for Linden dollars. This is one of the many emerging business models that Second Life residents keep inventing. In the Wired article: "Making a Living in Second Life" Wharton professor Dan Hunter, an expert on law and virtual worlds, said that virtual worlds are becoming spaces where "globalization of services can occur".
Some companies and organizations are taking advantages of the possibilities offered by the Metaverse and building VR intranets and extranets in Second life. A firm can purchase an island in Second Life, build virtual office and entertainment space, and use it as a workspace for its staff (intranet) and a marketing and sales point for its customers (extranet). Marketing presentations, university lectures and business meetings in Second Life can be very close to the "real thing", with the added value that the organizers, and the participants, can save a lot of money and time.
The last issue of Nature's has an article on "2020 Computing: The creativity machine - What will emerge from using the Internet as a research tool?". The answer, Vernor Vinge argues, will be limited only by our imaginations. He says: "Second Life provides a range of software tools, including a programming language, that gives participants the power to create artefacts according to their own designs. Such virtual worlds have already been used for educational projects, and are worthy of psychological and social research". A good starting point to read about educational projects in SL is the Education section of their website. The picture below shows a university campus in SL.
Another good example of educational activities in VR is the Second Life Future Salon, which meets once a month in the Metaverse to discuss innovation in digital worlds and culture, information technology, simulation, video games, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, 3D creation tools, computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D prototyping, the geospatial Web, augmented reality, and all forms of digital environments plus the technology, social, and business dialogues that can be impacted by them.
The Salon is the Second Life version of the Future Salons held on a monthly basis in Los Angeles and many other US cities. The Future Salons are run by the Acceleration Studies Foundation, which started the SL Salon as a means to reach worldwide audiences.
There are many other examples of real work done in Second life. At least two US business schools are exploring ways of using Second Life, and US bank Wells Fargo has opened up its own Metaverse headquarters in the Wells Fargo Second Life island. Technology analysts say the bank's venture is part of a trend towards using online worlds designed for entertainment in a more serious way. See also the MIT Advertising Lab article "Wells Fargo Opens Advertising Floodgates Into Virtual Life"
There are also examples of using Second Life for social initiatives. Democracy Island, sponsored by the ICAIR Foundation and Institute for Information Law and Policy, New York Law School, is a VR environment to offer government entities and interest groups an on-line space for conducting citizen consultation. The image below shows a typical meeting in Democracy Island.
The American Cancer Society is exploring the potential of Second Life for public outreach with its Second Life Relay For Life. Second Life residents can show their support and contribute to the work of the American Cancer Society by purchasing a virtual ACS t-shirt for their avatar. The Wired article referenced above reports that in a recent contract with the UC Davis Medical Center, funded by the Center for Disease Control, the US designer Kimberly Rufer-Bach created virtual clinics in Second Life to train emergency workers who might be called upon to rapidly set up medical facilities in a national crisis such as a biological attack.
VR technology was initially overhyped and suffered from the Internet bubble of the late 90s and early 00s. But today, with enabling technologies in place and the diffusion of wideband access, we can see a growing number of operational implementations of VR worlds, with popular events taking place in the Metaverse, and an emergent economy consolidating in and around it. I am persuaded that VR is now entering, with other emerging technologies, an acceleration phase without bounds. Indeed, VR technology is in a phase similar to that of the Web of the early 90s, when only the most innovative and technology savvy businesses had realized the huge potential of the new technology for "serious" applications. We all remember that after only one or two years the Web started to really take off and everybody was suddenly forced to take it very seriously.
So I think we should all take Second Life very seriously as one of the first examples of mass market virtual reality. VR technology is rapidly moving towards achieving sufficient maturity for business applications and the Web of the near future, beyond the technologies known today as "Web 2.0", will be a "Web 3.0", or better "Web 3.D", based on online 3D virtual reality.
We build VR environments like the VR facility in the image below for our clients, and can see how the demand is steadily rising, not only in the US but also in Europe. While this article is more focused on Second Life, and the first steps in SL look like magic to newcomers, the technology of SL is not leading edge VR. The appeal of SL to business users is more related to cost effectiveness and marketing: if you need a VR intranet or extranet, building it on top of a popular platform like SL permits not only saving (a lot of) money and time, but also attracting the large and growing population of Second Life users.
The further growth of Second Life will be boosted by a new 11 million dollars funding. Linden Lab CEO Rosedale plans to use the money to expand internationally and implementing the next generation of SL technology.
I hope they will include a voice chat system for SL users. At this moment, SL supports only text chat. Many residents interested in "serious" business and educational applications think the lack of a native voice chat system is an important limit of SL and use Skype conferences to talk to other avatars in SL. Skype conferences are limited to 5 simultaneous users, but there are systems able to support more users like TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Vivox.
The lack of a native voice chat system, and other missing features such as the very annoying inability to use one's own name, show that the creators of Second Life thought residents would use it mainly as an anonymous chat space, and had not foreseen that many residents would rather wish to use SL as an extension of their daily personal and professional life. It appears that Linden Lab understand this now, and I look forward to seeing native voice chat and other business oriented features.
From the Wikipedia entry on Second Life: "Many Second Life residents have noted the similarities between Second Life and the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. This is actually a stated goal of Linden Lab - to create a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business and otherwise communicate".
Well... Second Life is a great first step in virtual world building, but nobody would ever mistake a Second Life screen for, say, a picture of a place in the real world. Things look cartoonish and there are rendering artifacts due to the need to balance realism with bandwidth and computing resources. On the contrary, Stephenson's fictional Metaverse is based on neural user interfaces with direct stimulation of the brain, which produce a fully immersive sensorial experience indistinguishable from physical reality. Virtual reality is not yet "Real Virtuality".
At the same time, bandwidth and computing resources available for a given cost are bound to continue increasing according to Moore's law and in a few years computer generated metaverses for end users will have photorealistic visual quality. Of course, this is already the case for application specific metaverses, e.g. military simulators, running on powerful local networks and expensive hardware and using 3D displays (domes, spheres, VR glasses) which permit much more realistic rendering than computer screens. Even on computer screens, modern videogames like Half Life 2 already permit very photorealistic experiences, and many practitioners believe that by 2010 videogames will be perfectly photorealistic.
Spatial sound is already available, and devices like force feedback gloves and body suits permit touching things in a Metaverse. There are experiments ongoing to generate smell locally according to specifications received from a remote site, and perhaps somebody will solve also the problem of how to taste a drink in virtual reality.
In summary, I think we can assume that before, say, 2015, (only 9 years to go) VR technology will permit fully realistic experiences for all practical purposes. Then there will be fully immersive VR with direct stimulation of the brain: real virtuality as good as the physical universe. While, of course, retaining the possibility to permit users doing things which would be impossible in physical reality, e.g. flying over the Caribbean Islands like a bird or walking on Mars without a spacesuit.
This will be great but also generate frustration in users who may then think that real life is not as good as virtual life. Is there a danger that people will forget the real world and escape en masse to VR?
I don't think so. What I think will happen is that real and virtual worlds will merge, and we will become used to the Metaverse as a part of our everyday life. More and more people will work in virtual worlds. Instead of frustrating hours in traffic jams to reach the workplace, some of us will do business in a virtual office, perhaps located at the other side of the world.
Science fiction, but close to becoming routine reality and we can see the first steps today in Second Life. VR technology is evolving rapidly and we will see some promising developments soon. Interesting developments to watch include the Open Croquet project, X3D, the Flux project and, of course, a number of innovative computer games.