Corey Ondrejka on the Future of Virtual Worlds

When Corey Ondrejka was let go as Linden Lab's CTO he took on an academic role at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. If his blogging is any indication, it must have been a great class. For his last faculty lecture, Ondrejka took a look at the future of virtual worlds and technology. I've been browsing through the slide deck in my downtime today (it's 168 slides, but most are short or have small changes), and it's well worth a look.  You can find Ondrejka's related posts here and here. [FYI: The first 69 slides warm up to the actual virtual worlds predictions, but they're still worth your time.]
 

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My favorite point: "Virtual worlds are communication. Communication must be pervasive."

I'm inclined to disagree that there's a false dichotomy between mirror worlds and virtual worlds. Though without hearing the accompanying lecture, I'm willing to assume Ondrejka's analysis goes at least a little past those bullet points.  The terms aren't perfect, but I think they capture the essence of the idea that right now, at least, people tend to approach worlds like Second Life and Google Earth with different intentions and use cases in mind.

Personally, I see it as similar (though not exactly identical) to the split between virtual worlds for work and virtual worlds for play or virtual worlds for open-ended socialization or virtual worlds for more intensive gameplay (i.e., MMORPGs). Ondrejka asks what happens when work and play start to merge, and that question's probably worth asking for virtual and mirror worlds.

As they're all a part of the same general medium for communication (which wants to be pervasive), I could see them all starting to overlap and blurring the lines between genres, not eradicating them entirely.

For a good example, Charles Stross' Halting State (out in paperback this summer) is pretty great. It's certainly been on my mind since I picked it up after hearing Raph Koster hype it over the course of four days and three conferences in February.

As Ondrejka concludes, it's all coming together:  "Future virtual worlds will have more of the real world available as content (not necessarily mirror worlds), will be blended to varying degrees with the real world (blended as augmented reality, alternate reality, and virtual reality), be available to you everywhere (on any computer or cell phone connected to the Web), [and] be a basic component of communication (which people will use for work, play, and games)."

Comments

[Tele3dworld]

But why show all this on powerpoint? Death by PowerPoint does not point to the future. To demonstrate; the future should be presented in the future 3D to 3D communication format.

[Tele3dworld]

But why show all this on powerpoint? Death by PowerPoint does not point to the future. To demonstrate; the future should be presented in the future 3D to 3D communication format.