by ckpicker and 2 contributors (josh, marthar), 16 pages, 0 comment. Modified on .

Contains a collection of information and research findings pertaining to virtual worlds and the metaverse

Contents (hide)

1. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Virtual Worlds
2. Revealing your interests and values in the Metaverse
3. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Mirror Worlds
4. Mirror Worlds overlaid with Virtual World and Social Impacts
5. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Lifelogging
6. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Augmented Reality
7. Augmented Reality + Mirror Worlds working together
8. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - How the 4 scenariors combine and interrelate
9. Metaverse Roadmap: Forecasts - The Valuecosm
10. Videos | Metaverse U Conference
11. The Conversational Interface: Our Next Great Leap Forward
12. Promontory Point: The Transcontinental Railroad and the Coming Conversational Interface
13. Leadership is for the asking...
14. Ten-Year Forecast Research Agenda | The Institute For The Future
15. Superstruct FAQ | The Institute For The Future
16. Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future. | The Institute For The Future
17. Comments

1. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Virtual Worlds

   Virtual Worlds (Intimate/Simulation) Virtual worlds increasingly augment the economic and social life of physical world communities. The sharpness of many virtual and physical world distinctions will be eroded going forward. In both spaces, issues of identity, trust and reputation, social roles, rules, and interaction remain at the forefront.
   
   

   http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/02.html#vw

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2. Revealing your interests and values in the Metaverse

   Many of today’s “netizens” use 2D personal web pages and home pages in MySpace, and in Korea, 2.5D “minihompy” in Cyworld as their preferred interface to the world. Will tomorrow’s “Metaversans” require potential contacts (those seeking emails, profile info, or live contact) to teleport to the VW address of one of their beautiful virtual homes, with exteriors that display their public interests and values to the world?
   
   On the social side, perhaps the most obvious persistent trend will be identity experimentation, self-revelation and role play in VWs, and the creative variation of social norms around gender, ethnicity, social class, etiquette, and group values and goals. We see this in today’s pioneering social VWs like Second Life, and social networks like MySpace. As the virtual worlds scenario unfolds, we can expect an explosion in the number of people engaged in such activities, and the ensuing social change to bring both positive and disruptive effects.

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3. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Mirror Worlds

   Mirror worlds are informationally-enhanced virtual models or “reflections” of the physical world. Their construction involves sophisticated virtual mapping, modeling, and annotation tools, geospatial and other sensors, and location-aware and other lifelogging (history recording) technologies.
   
   

   http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/02.html#mw

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4. Mirror Worlds overlaid with Virtual World and Social Impacts

   Once GPS-localization and videoconferencing can both be done within the MW, it seems a compelling platform for socializing and entertainment as well. See Inputs 8Bj for more on recent videoconferencing trends.
   
   Imagine the following Virtual Town Square (VTS) scenario (Inputs 9Bb), in Anytown, USA, circa 2012. You are contemplating your evening entertainment options, so you teleport to various local VTS’s, accurate but flashier mirror world models of your town’s most popular social locations, to efficiently review your options. In each, you can browse 2D screens for movies, entertainment, etc., and quickly see which of your friends are at what venues, based on public reporting by their GPS-equipped phones.
   
   You can also see their 3D avatars and talk to them firsthand, by voice or text, to see what’s going on, or unobtrusively read their public calendars to see if they’d like others to join them. You can talk with the avatars of others visiting the space, who are either browsing along with you or who are downtown in person. Once the digerati of one city find personal value in a social VTS mirror world, others may be built in rapid succession. As with websites, there would be a good economic case for businesses to keep them up to date with the most recent information, live feeds (webcams, etc.) and advert video of the local activity.
   
   

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5. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Lifelogging

   Lifelogging (Intimate/Augmentation) In lifelogging, augmentation technologies record and report the intimate states and life histories of objects and users, in support of object- and self-memory, observation, communication, and behavior modeling. Object Lifelogs (“spimes,” "blogjects," etc.) maintain a narrative of use, environment and condition for physical objects. User Lifelogs, ("life-caching," “documented lives,” etc.) allow people to make similar recordings of their own lives. Object lifelogs overlap with the AR scenario, and both rely on AR information networks and ubiquitous sensors.
   
   As their cost drops steadily in coming years, many new object lifelog opportunities will emerge. Would you pay an extra $10 for a computer screen that logs a memory of its recent visual states in case of a crash? What would you pay for lifelogs on your car, keys and wallet? For a wallet that notified you if the credit cards weren’t quickly replaced within it? Used appropriately, object history and smartness can improve our awareness, security, and productivity.
   
   
   

   http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/02.html#ll

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6. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - Augmented Reality

   Augmented Reality (External/Augmentation) In augmented reality, Metaverse technologies enhance the external physical world for the individual, through the use of location-aware systems and interfaces that process and layer networked information on top of our everyday perception of the world.
   
   

   http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/02.html#ar

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7. Augmented Reality + Mirror Worlds working together

   What might emerge in the near-term is location-based cellular radio (LBCR). Today, 3.5 and 4G wireless platforms can already stream internet audio to the car radio and cell phone. Add GPS and a mirror world directory system and you can deliver location-based streaming radio to the mobile user. Many mobile users would like car and cell phone radio channels that give them 1) ultralocal news, politics, weather, and traffic, 2) reviews and business-published info on local restaurants, shops, and entertainment events, as they are approaching them, and 3) educational and historical information for local landmarks. LBCR might be a multi-billion dollar industry by 2016. Or it may be a white elephant platform still waiting for user adoption.
   
   

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8. Metaverse Roadmap Overview - How the 4 scenariors combine and interrelate

   The Metaverse contains elements of all four scenarios. At the same time, their technologies broadly overlap, as in the use of a mirror world map inside a virtual world, or a heads-up display AR system or object or user lifelog inside a mirror or virtual world. There are also more general ways the scenarios overlap.
   
   

   http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/03.html

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9. Metaverse Roadmap: Forecasts - The Valuecosm

   Some time after 2015 (the expected emergence of a functional Conversational Interface), it will be easy to construct automated preference and values maps of all consenting metaverse users, simply by archiving their public conversations with the system. This data, when combined with mirror world models of physical space, will allow the emergence of the Valuecosm, an environment where powerful economic, environmental, and political actors will regularly check with the public values maps of a geographic or virtual community before taking any major action (new store, new laws, etc.) within it. Likewise, individuals seeking to find geographic and virtual communities of shared values (including cognitive diversity) will be able to co-locate in neighborhoods with others of similar mind. The Valuecosm, and the automated preference expression tools that will emerge around it (voting, boycotting, information filters, other social action systems) will greatly empower individual actors relative to today's most powerful actors. They will also enable the discovery of new positive sum strategies and processes that would be likely to be desired by members of both geographic and virtual social networks. Personal and neighborhood diversity will likely increase substantially due to the Valuecosm's effect, with meaningful cultural differences being maintained, neighborhood by neighborhood in physical and virtual space, while global rights and entitlements become more standardized.
   
   

   http://metaverseroadmap.org/inputs2B.html#predictions

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10. Videos | Metaverse U Conference

    Videos from the Metaverse U conference. All videos are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
    
    

    http://metaverse.stanford.edu/conference-videos/conference-videos

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11. The Conversational Interface: Our Next Great Leap Forward

    The Conversational Interface: Our Next Great Leap Forward (aka Conversational User Interface, Linguistic UI, Natural UI, Spoken Dialog System, etc.) © 2003-2007, John Smart. Reproduction, review and quotation encouraged with attribution. Outline A Question of Priorities The CI Network: A National Priority for Our Generation   More CI Details On Phase Change Singularities: The Nature and Timing of CI Emergence     After the Symbiotic Age: Speculations on Autonomy and Beyond The essay below contains a brief description and prediction for the emergence of the Conversational Interface (CI), on computer hardware and software platforms called Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS). The CI/SDS is also called the "Conversational User Interface" (CUI), "Linguistic User Interface (LUI)", "Universal Linguistic Interface (ULI)", "Voice User Interface (VUI)", "Natural User Interface (NUI)" and other terms.
    
    

    http://www.accelerationwatch.com/lui.html

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12. Promontory Point: The Transcontinental Railroad and the Coming Conversational Interface

    This last point stems from the simple mathematics of globalization. Looking at it from the first world, we realize we can't change the numerical and cognitive advantage of the third world's exponentiating technical force, even if we wanted to. There just aren't enough U.S. children to staff the rapidly growing technical ranks we are going to create over the next few decades. Even if we could double the present effectiveness of our science and technology education, itself a valuable social goal, we would have little effect on the globalization of technical jobs. A network property is emerging here. This argues strongly that the best strategic educational goal for the U.S. and the rest of the first world is to help our children learn to be come effective collaborators, partners, and managers of this burgeoning global technical workforce. The U.S. technical and managerial work force will work smartest by helping all the most eager and globally productive humans to come together rapidly, fluidly and flexibly to develop all manner of technological and social solutions to human problems. In the process, we should expect to increasingly minimize and bypass politics in this new bottom-up driven world we are creating. Managers need a basic science and technological fluency, but most importantly, they must know where to find the world's natural, technical, and human resources, and how to work with them in ethical, non-zero sum creative inte
    
    

    http://www.accelerationwatch.com/promontorypoint.html

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13. Leadership is for the asking...

    Most importantly for each of us, at this pivotal moment in human history, there are unique opportunities for enlightened corporate, political, and social leadership in Metaverse exploration and development. We propose that the best use of the Metaverse Scenarios and Inputs in this inaugural roadmap is not simply to consider them for near-term economic potential, but to ask how these technologies might help or hinder our ability to manage humanity’s larger concerns, both now and in the future. How might we use the various forms of the Metaverse to guide our response to global warming, and the emergence of “climate neutral” energy and transportation? How might we use these systems to avert a war, improve an election, reduce crime and poverty, or put an end to human rights abuses? How might we use the Metaverse, in the words of Jonas Salk, to become "good ancestors" to our descendants?
    
    

    http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/03.html#mvs

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14. Ten-Year Forecast Research Agenda | The Institute For The Future

    Research Agenda: The coming decade will challenge organizations-and human society at large-like no other decade in recent history. Extreme environmental pressures, large-scale economic disruptions, and technologically amplified human expression will combine to create what may seem like an alien landscape. The Ten-Year Forecast will leverage cutting-edge social software and gaming platforms to engage a broad public in anticipating the future, imagining personal and organizational responses, and creating public dialog about the challenges ahead.
    Research Tasks: SuperStruct: A Massively Collaborative Forecasting Game The next ten years will be a time of taking the world apart and putting it back together in new ways. Organizations will find themselves building new layers of enterprise on old foundations and competing with fleet new structures for getting things done in the market place, in the environment, and in society at large. To probe the complexity of this new world, The Ten-Year Forecast will launch a new platform that will integrate cutting-edge futures research in demographics, economics, environment, health, and technology with the insights and innovations of on-the-ground, everyday people, creating their own digital media scenarios of the future. Called SuperStruct, this massively collaborative forecasting game will create a rich, immersive experience of the future of corporate society.
    
    

    http://www.iftf.org/node/2175

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15. Superstruct FAQ | The Institute For The Future

    Q: What is Superstruct ? A: Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you’ll help us chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.
    
    

    http://www.iftf.org/node/2096

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16. Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future. | The Institute For The Future

    Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future. This fall, the Institute for the Future invites you to play Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future—it’s about inventing the future. Everyone is welcome to join the game. Watch for the opening volley of threats and survival stories, September 2008.
    
    This is a game of survival, and we need you to survive.
    
    Super-threats are massively disrupting global society as we know it. There’s an entire generation of homeless people worldwide, as the number of climate refugees tops 250 million. Entrepreneurial chaos and “the axis of biofuel” wreak havoc in the alternative fuel industry. Carbon quotas plummet as food shortages mount. The existing structures of human civilization—from families and language to corporate society and technological infrastructures—just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.
    
    You can help. Tell us your story. Strategize out loud. Superstruct now.
    
    It's your legacy to the human race.
    
    Want to learn more about the game? Read the Superstruct FAQ.
    
    Superstruct Now
    
    Get a head start on the game. It’s the summer of 2019. Imagine you’re already there, and tell us a little bit about your future self. Where are you having dinner tonight?
    
    (Post your story below in the comments if you're already an IFTF member, or email your answer to SuperstructMission@iftf.org! We'll post email replies on this blog throughout the summer.)
    
    
    

    http://www.iftf.org/node/2098

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