Prediction: One virtual world to rule them all

Would they actually laugh or would they LOL?

I read this 10 minutes ago and I thought it was an excellent idea. But I thought back to what happened in Snow Crash.. and the Metaverse is not so attractive now.

For the people who did not read it, basically there's a huge, virtual street where people can log into and interact with each other. There was this guy named Raven who's hired by this rich guy to brain wash all the hackers in the metaverse.

Think about it guys, if everything's connected, it simply becomes a bigger target for criminals. If hackers attack google, their sites and services go down. But if everything becomes too interdependent, the damage spreads.

Eventually, the internet itself will evolve into a giant MMORPG with 3D graphics, rendering pretty much all of these commercial, proprietary worlds moot. (Yes, that also includes Second Life.)

3D graphics, computing power, broadband will merge together into "Web 3.0". The graphics will be rendered in-browser. People will set up virtual worlds on servers, and the worlds will interconnect with one another. You'll create a personna (or multiple ones) and visit one site which is set up as a virtual mall to buy things, another could be a racing sim, another could be a GTA style world, and of course there will be the countless FPS worlds.

This is really where everything is heading towards. The "closed wall" MMORPGs out today will be antiquated and most of them gone in 10 years time.

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Eventually, the internet itself will evolve into a giant MMORPG with 3D graphics, rendering pretty much all of these commercial, proprietary worlds moot.
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Makes sense, given that all the books in the library are filled with giant, full-color pictures. That totally how we want to quickly parse information.

If they can help it, the Second Life guys will be the basis or core or model from which there will become a Web 3.0. Anyone who has seen their evolution from the start can tell that they take a lot of risks and I bet opening up the source will be one they eventually put forward.

However, "Web 3.0" is kind of a bad descriptor for what this future internet will be called. So is "Second Life" for that matter. Does anyone have an idea of what we WILL call this 3D internet? Or will we phase out webpages and simply call the new thing the world wide web? Metaverse? Any language theorists want to propose something?

hmmm.. ok, i'm just thinking about this from a gaming perspective. and i don't think that would be the greatest idea.

MMOs are already so time-consuming (read: LIFE-consuming) that merging them all into one big central world is just a step closer to letting them completely take over one's real life. i'll admit, it would be a cool thing to have a virtual world so vast and diverse that it would practically mirror the real world, but is that really such a great idea?

soon, people would be choosing between their real lives and their MMO lives on an even larger scale than they do now. their virtual fantasy world could fulfil everything they think they need in life..

no. i definately believe that there need to be certain limitations on how much your in-game avatar actually represents who you are. people can't just replace themselves with that.

Well, I and a lot of the people I associate with already use the term "Metaverse," simply because it's got a history and a certain subset of net users already understand what it refers to. I work for an online newspaper that covers Second Life, but we'd be open to covering anything that is pertinent to any Metaverse-related project, and we decided to call the paper the Metaverse Messenger, not only because it had a nice ring to it, but precisely because we're open to whatever the future holds. Incidentally, if you haven't tried Second Life and you'd like to know a little more about it, we have public archives of the paper at our website (www.metaversemessenger.com).

It would be nice to have continuity between worlds. A transporter model would work but doesn't have the continuity. A doorway model would work, with a common symbol for a portal door plus destination. Another model is a variation on the LOTR-inspired "One World" concept, whereby there exists a portal world that one returns to or passes through one the way to and forth.

Dont worry guys, pretty soon humanity will fall in on itself and the ants will have a much more organised infrastructure than we do. In future civilizations The Metaverse will be cited as one of many reasons why the catastrophe happend and at least that society will learn something from our mistakes. hopefully.

The question I'm asking is why?

Why would, Blizzard, say, want to open up WoW to a Metaverse they don't control? Why would any developer, considering that they're inviting any game, no matter how badly made, to screw around with their design.

In the Metaversii that I've read, games act as a special case - your Metaverse avatar can be used in the game, but you can't bring any of your abilities, that only have meaning within the game rules, into other games. Proclaiming that one day it will be otherwise is like saying that there's no problems with using a Dungeons & Dragons character in a game of Shadowrun. The format's wrong.

I think the answer to the why question is the same as
the answer to "why have a standardized web browser?" Because ultimately companies want the maximum amount of people to interface with their content. Content is a commodity. Due to the accelerating rate of technology growth a complex 3-D game will soon become very easy to make, so compete in the network or die. Also, new tools being developed, like Eyebeam's OGLE (http://www.3d-test.com/interviews/OGLE_1.htm)will allow for the sharing of these 3-D games/environments and change
the terrain of the game, accelerating the commoditization process.Third, for those interested, the notion of an evolving centralized Metaverse is also being addressed by the Acceleration Studies Foundation (for which I am a volunteer), both in their Second Life Future Salon (http://slfuturesalon.blogs.com/second_life_future_salon/)and more seriously via a big push to get the top VW thinkers together to develop a "living" Metaverse Roadmap (http://www.accelerating.org/metaverse.html).I
tend to agree with Johnson in that we're heading toward the RL Matrix, a fluid patchwork 3-D world. I'll go further and argue that accelerating change, bottom-up dynamics, the flattening of the world,
and a shift in the way humans relate to information will be at the heart of this evolving thang.