Mobitrends

One of my previous projects, VR-WEAR, died 2 years ago. Financing of the prototyping phase failed  - happens, was the crisis and anyways the prototype was still expensive and probably a bit to in advance… For those who don’t remember the idea was to create a set of virtual reality devices enabling strong engagement in video-games both enabling immersion and interaction with sensors monitoring facial expression, eyeballs motions and body language. We built proof of concepts of the headsets and the glove and bound the sensors to Second Life enhancing the avatars with their puppet masters body language.

This year at CES2011 are showing that the vision I had still lives – and we’re getting closer and closer :

1. Microsoft announced that “Avatar Kinect” is coming to the Xbox 360 and will apparently be a place where you can virtually hang out with your “friends” using the ability for Kinect to detect facial gestures like eyebrows, smiles, and laughs.
2. Sony unveiled a crazy 3D prototype of Head Mounted Display  with 720p OLED displays and 5.1 sounds (no price nor release date)

MindArk, the editor of Entropia Universe just got a bank license in Sweden to enable them to provide real banking services around their virtual currency the PED (10PED = 1USD).
Last year 400M USD were exchanged in Entropia Universe and thus it’s interesting to see how a real banking system will perform in this virtual world enabling users to deposit their money to have it insured up to 60kUSD and earning benefits from it. A couple years ago such a system developed in Second Life out of individual initiatives and some of those went nuts with improbable interest rates and no real warranty at all for the customers.
Nevertheless this first experiment is certainly a milestone in the evolution of virtual worlds and if you’re interested in that theme you should definetly read “Halting state” by Charles Stross which pictures a robbery on a virtual bank held by a start-up focusing on providing banking services to virtual worlds. Pretty nice business model – would love to start one of those!

3D web is an amazing playground for me. While we are really early stage in terms of usage and adoption, we already have a lot of pretty amazing implementations of 3DWeb environments and while the initial hype we witnessed in 2006/2007 is now over real use cases are starting to happen.
Also it’s getting harder and harder to make a difference between an online 3D game (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft and a 3DWeb environment such as Second Life. Indeed while the latter misses NPCs and objectives and allows user generated contents, both are place where users/players seek each other to spend a time “together” around a common objective shared within that world, wether it’s talking about how to convince the curmudgeon on a role playing session or take down Malygos in WoW.

First Prediction : Most first-tier businesses will be carrying out experiments about the use of 3Dweb within their organization as a powerful brainstorming / meeting tool and will be seeking for ROI not press coverage – those experiments will mostly remain under the hood and private.

Second Prediction : Bots and NPCs will become common thing within 3Dweb environments and IA will be able to start showing its full potential. Those bots will enable a persistent presence within virtual worlds and will try to fight the “alone” effect you get when entering Second Life at random times.

Third Prediction : Accessories especially designed to engage in 3D web will roll out and the one already on the market will strongly develop. We can think here about Logitech’s 3DConnexion or VR-WEAR‘s devices and SL-viewer (a webcam *is* a device after all).

Fourth Prediction : 3Dweb will get mobile and to the games consoles. 2009 will see reference implementations of major 3Dwebs on non-PC communicating platforms. While console makers are working on their own 3Dweb software (Playstation Home, and Xbox’s avatars and soon to be virtual world) market leaders will have to move to this market.

Fifth Prediction : 3Dweb will interconnect seamlessly with 2Dweb communication tools. First experiments were witnessed through tools such as SL-Messenger enabling msn/gtalk/aim/yahoochat/twitter/visualbookmarking from Second Life which will evolve as interconnection platforms for 3Dweb communities and common web communities.