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About This Technology

The growing popularity of virtual worlds—including Second Life, a visually rich, avatar-mediated three-dimensional virtual environment, and the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft—is fueling the development of new online platforms and technologies that could take the Internet to the next level, enabling new forms of socialization, communication, collaboration, and commerce. Like virtual-reality systems (until recently, the most common type of virtual environment), virtual worlds typically offer 3-D environments that users can "walk through" and explore. However, virtual worlds are unlikely to use virtual reality's immersive hardware (such as head-mounted displays) for the foreseeable future. Instead, virtual worlds rely on server-side software, Internet communications, and client software running on desktop computers, consoles, and (potentially) handheld devices. Typical features of virtual worlds include avatars, real-time interaction among a large number of users, 3-D environments, in-world social activities, and tools for users to create in-world objects. Some virtual worlds also support financial transactions, and Second Life in particular has seen some individuals make sizable profits through in-world commerce. Some virtual worlds are open, public, environments; others are closed, private, environments.

Although some virtual worlds are already in existence, these environments are only the first wave of virtual-worlds commercialization. Arguably, virtual worlds are where the World Wide Web was in the early 1990s, when most people did not fully grasp or anticipate what the business implications would be and when performance, lack of applications, and poor usability hampered mass-market adoption. Certainly, virtual worlds need to improve on these factors before they will be ready for prime time. Open-source virtual-worlds software, improved user interfaces, scalable platforms, and interoperability between worlds are just some of the factors that will affect virtual-worlds development. Today, most media attention focuses on Second Life (as well as World of Warcraft), but in fact, a growing number of virtual worlds and platforms exist, including OpenSim, Forterra's OLIVE, Teleplace, and PlayStation Home. Most of today's virtual worlds are primarily entertainment oriented, but business and educational applications are growing. For example, BP trains new graduates with a virtual world from ProtonMedia, IBM holds major internal meetings and conferences in Second Life, and Thomson Reuters is using a virtual-worlds solution from Forterra to assist in a change-management program.

Virtual worlds, like the World Wide Web before them, are likely to have an impact on a wide range of companies and organizations. Consumer companies will be able to market and trade goods and services in the new consumer marketplaces that virtual worlds create. Large companies, government organizations, and educational institutions will have new, highly interactive, and media-rich platforms for collaborative work and learning. IT, communications, and media companies will be able to provide virtual-worlds content, software, hardware, and communications. In the long term, virtual worlds could create a wide variety of economic, technological, and social changes in society, just as the World Wide Web once did. Perhaps one or more new global multinationals will emerge, mobile phones will control open-source avatars that will travel through many virtual worlds, and some consumers will spend more money in virtual worlds than in the real world. In time, people may find it difficult to separate the real world and virtual worlds completely because, for example, objects created in virtual worlds are "printed" in rapid-prototyping machines, and avatars become photorealistic representations of their owners. Some people believe that virtual worlds will lead to a transition from a 2-D Web to the 3-D Web. Although the 2-D Web is likely too well established to disappear, virtual worlds could give rise to a whole new Internet application (or set of applications), on a scale similar to that of the World Wide Web and possibly with even greater economic, technological, and social impact.