I recently came across Erica Driver's (Forrester Research) paper Web3D: The Next Major Internet Wave. I shouldn't really call it a blueprint - as we don't know what else is coming up soon - but it gets pretty close to it. For her, Web3D is "a system of linked interactive 3-D and 2-D environments that will include everything from user-specific, private applications ... to virtual worlds ... and people will move among these in a seamless, natural way". As Forrester charges for this study I shouldn't summarize the report here but it is loaded with interesting hypotheses, facts & figures and useful overviews of providers (hard-/software) that might become dominant players in the nascent Virtual World industry.
It's good to be upbeat about the future of WEb3D but Driver is in upbeat overdrive. There is no single sentence showing some scepticism about how things develop. I agree, comparison with the web in the 1990s is striking but she basically assumes that once the technology is there people will full-heartedly embrace it. I agree, take-up will accelerate in the future. But one might also argue that there will be a backlash as people refuse to go fully virtual. For a more sober view on that look at Richard Sennett's writings (The Culture of Capitalism and others). Also, security aspects are not really addressed.
Despite all this, it is definitively worthwhile reading the report. Even if not everything materializes (by the time Driver predicts) it surely gives us an interesting glimps into the future.
Bye for now!
Charles
3 weeks ago
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