Virtual world killer apps

Virtual worlds seem to be distinct from the Internet but are really the natural evolution of the web as a communications, commerce, information and computation medium; a move to real-time 3D interaction from 2D text.

Virtual worlds are no longer exclusively recreational, they are becoming increasingly routine for a wide range of professional activities. Will Sun Microsystems be the first to announce their corporate earnings simultaneously in-world as they do now on CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog?

There are about 50 virtual worlds in various stages of funding, launch and adoption. Linden Lab’s Second Life is the largest and most complex with an economy in excess of $1.5m USD per day. With the surge in activity, killer apps are starting to emerge.

Consumer Killer App: 3D Immersive Shopping
Shopping could be the killer app of virtual worlds for consumers, just like email drew people to the Internet. Shopping, not in the sense of avatar couture, coiffeur and custom animation, although this is an important sector of the virtual world economy, but in the sense of physical-world retailers having virtual showrooms for customers to review and potentially purchase their products in a 3D visual immersive way, everything from cars to furniture to electronics to tax services to books and music.

Steelcase furniture showroom
Click here to teleport

EOLUS/SAP experimental shop
Click here to teleport

Business Killer App: the Interface
For businesses, it is not about the application but the interface, the interface is the application. Virtual worlds are the modern functionality-extending overlay for any existing application, a 3D real-time information-rich collaboration environment. Some examples include IBM's virtual NOC business, constructing VNOCs for their own and client operations, Intel's in-world Dev Zone developer network meetings and Coke's "Virtual Thirst," Cisco's "Connected Life" and Osram Lighting's "One Million Dollar Idea" virtual world creativity campaigns.

IBM Watson's VNOC (Virtual Network Operations Center)
Click here to teleport

Pervasiveness
Due to resource consumption, virtual worlds are not yet used pervasively by most people; they are an application to log into intermittently, just like the Internet was before broadband. It could be in five years that computer processing power and broadband speeds, including on the mobile platform, make virtual world pervasiveness possible. Even before then, it will probably be as natural to book an airline ticket in-world via a travel sim as it would be to go to Orbitz.

How could progress not be underway in an evolution from users to residents?

Content Smorgasbord

What a wonderful time to be alive! There is more content than ever now available in a variety of formats.

News. Of course the content smorgasbord trend started with the Internet, although really the library was the predecessor, in fact most European nations do not have the public library resources that are often taken for granted in the US. With the Internet, information became free and consumable. News. All functions and items from newspapers and much more.

Audiofiles. Starting in 2004 or earlier, audio files from conferences, lectures and talks started to be available for free on the Internet, provided by IT Conversations, the Long Now Foundation and Xerox PARC.

Music. Music content has also been evolving quickly. The best service (note service not product as the current market delivery mechanism) this month seems to be YahooTunes, where for $5 a month, a vast collection of music is searchable and downloadable to computers and MP3 players. While not every artist and title is currently available, especially newer titles, there is a seemingly inexhaustible collection of music to absorb and enjoy. YahooTunes applies to copyrighted music; Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project has already made a variety of older out-of-copyright audio and video content available.

Video. Video content is not quite there. Being "there" would be having all video content (from all countries) available in a searchable repository for on demand viewing. Tivo and other personal video recorder technologies have allowed significant advances in effecting content on demand; content viewing without commercials and time-shifted for convenience.

Books. The content of all printed matter and media is the subject of several projects including the Brewster Kahle Internet Archival project, Google's university library digitization project and other efforts to put the whole of human knowledge available and online. Also exemplar of information sharing is MIT making its undergraduate courses available for free on the Internet.

Content is becoming freer and more fungible. A content consumer's dream. Content is also becoming increasingly manipulatable, as there are more ways to mix, match and alter content and create new content. Some examples of content creating are blogs, podcasts and citizen media à la Dan Gillmor; note the BBC requesting and posting pictures and comments from bystanders minutes after the July 2005 London tube station bomb incidents. Creating content, aside from being fun, is a great way to satisfy those human urges to personalize, individualize and actualize...

The Internet is Getting Bigger Faster

In the future, we will have multiple networks with much greater profundity than we do today. Some refer to the 2005 Internet as the baby of what is to come and this may be understating it.

Some key things are starting to coalesce into hastening the bigger better Internet. First is the already-accomplished full text-indexing of the known online world by search engines. They do a good job of finding, organizing and serving up whatever is out there on demand. That is baseline.
Right now the second factor driving the improvement and the next architectural redefining of the communications networks is the exponential explosion of available information. Everyone is getting online and writing blogs, posting photos, sharing music and videos, creating podcasts, putting their collections of books/videos/media/etc. online (á la Delicious Monster and soon to be others with expanded functionality) and soon we will be putting all of our household and business objects online. Per Adam Bosworth, the information explosion scales all right at the web server and application server layers but forces a rethink of the database underlying everything into a different format with distributed information routers or information servers or other new ideas.

The third important phenomenon that is happening now is that more is possible because there is a critical mass of users on the Internet in more and more countries. Traders would say the market has become liquid in describing the feeling of presence one gets online for maybe the first time in late 2004. The sheer presence of others online is felt in such ways as selling items on Amazon almost immediately, finding online game players immediately from a variety of countries, and seeing that 1000 people update their blogs at blogger.com each 10 minutes at almost any time. In fact the depth and breadth of those out there is even bigger and more powerful than the biggest march on Tiananmen or Red Square. The Internet liquidity allows the development and test of myriad new applications benefiting large and small affinity groups.

Fourth, new Internet R&D projects can be mentioned. There are a lot of smart people trying to figure out what the communications networks of the future need to be like.

In summary, being in the continuum of search/universe management capability explosion, data explosion and participant explosion is driving the advent of a new tier of communications networks from the currently known Internet.