Microsoft Chief Researcher Prefers Mirror Worlds to Virtual Worlds

At last October's Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo,  Daniel Schiappa, Microsot's General Manager for the Strategy Entertainment and Devices Division, noted that there wasn't a clear reason for him to be speaking. He did add, though, that in a year, we should all know what Microsoft's virtual worlds play will be—or won't be. At this week's Gartner Symposium ITXPO in Las Vegas, Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer for Microsoft, explained that he doesn't think purely virtual worlds will take hold.

When asked about user interfaces, Mundie discussed the advantages of technologies like Surface and the integration of more graphical and speech-based applications for a variety of devices. When the interviewer made the comparison to augmented reality, though, Mundie was less excited about the fantastical worlds than the real:

Today there's the physical world we all live in, and then there's people experimenting with virtual reality type things like Second Life and other stuff. I personally don't think that that kind of things is going to get huge traction. What I do think is the combination of sophisticated displays and direct manipulation and the ability to have the real world presented in a 3D environment as a navigation metaphor, such a you can move freely between things that you would do if you were in the physical world and doing some of the same things, whether it's going shopping, meeting friends, or whatever. You're doing it within a 3D virtual world, but that world is just a model of the actual world. That's going to be quite interesting.

We've looked at moving in this direction. Some of the photosynth technology [a tool that allows users to turn photos into immersive environments] that we've released over the last year and a half, I think is a precursor to allowing everybody to participate in the process of sifting up a representation of different levels of the physical world and then using them as part of the computing paradigm.

Microsoft, of course, is fairly active in different virtual worlds technologies, bringing WeeWorld avatars to the NHS and opening a presence in Second Life, but it's very active in its mirror world Microsoft  Virtual Earth. Microsoft has enabled the mirror world as a site for user-created content, acquired companies for better modeling tools, and purchased another to improve its mapping.
 

The discussion about virtual worlds comes about 30 minutes in and the fairly interesting discussion of photosynth goes on a bit longer.

At about 38:30, though, the conversation turned to 3D interfaces like goggles, caves, and the like. Generally the virtual worlds industry seems excited about products that gives 3D spaces  true 3D perspectives, but Mundie is skeptical:

Clearly people have had experimental products in each of these spaces for a while. Personally, I actually think that the place where 3D is going to burst on the scene is more on the entertainment area and probably more will be using some of these radical display technologies so that you don't have to wear glasses or goggles or anything else and if you position yourself at some reasonable position relative to the display you see a 3D image. [...]

Somehow between starting in a big screen environment where people take care to make sure that the 3D presentation is a positive experience, once that starts to work, I think it'll trickle down like it normally does into the home environment. The correlate to that will be this sort of "first life," if you will, kind of environment where we will have a 3D environment. It'll be of the physical world, and people will use that as a navigational metaphor. I think those will be the two things that will get us there the fastest. The latter one doesn't depend on 3D displays, though it certainly could be used in that environment.

It's pretty tricky to get a 3D immersive experience that doesn't make people sick when they're exposed to it. There's enough missing cues, in terms of your sense of balance and other things, that your brain gets confused when your eyes tell it one thing and everything else isn't there. If you're going to have prolonged use of a real 3D environment where it isn't an engineered experience like entertainment, I think you'll still see that stay in fairly limited domains of applications: you know, trainers for pilots and other things clearly have those attributes, but the simulators move your chair to simulate the other cues that are missing. I think that's going to be a limiter in terms of how broadly we'll see that other than in some of these entertainment or navigation metaphors.

With  entrepreneurs like Mitch  Kapor trying to bring consumer-level 3D cameras to market for 3D navigation,  3D displays seem like a natural next step. Now someone just needs to build in those extra cues before we become known as the motion sickness industry.

You can find the full webcast here.