An Update on Virtual Worlds

For the last three years I have been quite intrigued by virtual worlds and all the various capabilities we group under this term.  I believe they are ushering a new paradigm for user interfaces, as well as a whole round of innovative, more human-oriented, intuitive applications.

While many are excited by these possibilities, others remain skeptical.  Virtual worlds continue to be most popular in video games and massively multiplayer online environments.  Despite our high expectations, the number of virtual world applications in serious areas like education, business, and health care remains small.  Some think that this is just one more example of the kind of hype that the IT industry comes up with from time to time.

At this early stage, both fans and skeptics are right.  The promise is there, but it remains to be realized.  I, most definitely, remain positive.  Let me attempt to explain why. 

To begin with, what do we mean by serious virtual world applications?  While there will undoubtedly be many different such applications, I’d like to focus my comment on three specific categories.

Visual, Interactive Places   

In its simplest form, a virtual world can be viewed as a highly visual, interactive application or website.  We are taking the visualization technologies first introduced a few decades ago in supercomputing visualization, and later made popular by video games and applying them to many new kinds of applications in a variety of fields like education, business and health care.

For example, you might want to visit an online museum.  Pretty much all major museums have very good websites, with lots of information including pictures.  But, a virtual world representation of the museum would be far more visual and interactive.  It should let you actually walk around the virtual museum, see all the works arranged the way they are in the real or physical museum, or in whatever order a curator might choose to organize them.  A curator could assemble special exhibits only available online, choosing the works of a certain artist across many different museums, and assembling them in a particular order without having to physically move the paintings.  The possibilities are endless.

Or, say you are taking a course in astronomy and the online material includes realistic depictions of the surface of the moon, Mars, Venus and other planets and satellites put together using the best available pictures and simulations.  You can actually walk or fly around the surface of the planet, pick up rocks, zoom in on them and take your time exploring the terrain.  That is a very different experience from just reading about the material, looking at a picture, or watching an educational film, all of which would still be part of the website complementing the new virtual world capabilities.

One of the their most interesting feature, is the ability to immerse yourself in the virtual world via an avatar.  You need a way to navigate through the museum, the surface of Mars or whatever other world you are visiting, and walking around them using your avatar is a particularly innovative way of doing so.

Many virtual worlds are also social in nature, giving you the ability to see and communicate with others via their avatars.  In that sense, they are a kind of visual, immersive Web 2.0 site. Most popular consumer virtual world environments like Second Life and Club Penguin fall into this category.

One of the main criticisms directed at virtual worlds is that they are just places to go play games and hang out.  Who, other than teenagers with nothing to do, - critics ask - has the time to visit different places just to hang out and see who else is around to chat with?

Similar criticisms were directed at the nascent World Wide Web in the mid 90s when people where trying to figure out what surfing the Web was all about.  But, those criticisms were quieted as increasingly useful websites were developed.  For the vast majority of us, the Web became a place to go to for information, banking, shopping and other useful applications.  Something similar will undoubtedly happen with virtual worlds as more useful places are developed over the years.

Scheduled Events 

The defining characteristic of Web 1.0 is the content found in its many websites or places.  Web 2.0 is all about people and communities.  While virtual worlds are also about content, places, people and communities, what really brings them to life is the notion of events.  The most useful applications in virtual worlds will likely be online events, where we and others gather together at a specific place and time.

Conference rooms, classes, plays, concerts and ballgames are not places we visit simply when we feel like it.  We go to them for specific purposes at specific times.  For example, the curators of a special virtual museum exhibit might invite us on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 pm to guided tours through the virtual exhibit, where we can listen to descriptions of the works and interact with them and other guests in the tour.

Or the online astronomy course could meet on the surface of the planet being studied, rather than in a classic classroom.  Quite a number of universities have established virtual world sites and are exploring how best to use them in their online education programs.   

Companies have also started to use virtual worlds for training.  I recently heard from an executive of a company that has thousands of convenience stores around the world.  Training their staff is a huge challenge, especially given their high staff turnover. So, they are planning online training courses in a virtual world replica of one of their stores.  Similarly, IBM has been using virtual worlds to help onboard and train new employees, especially in more remote locations with no resident HR staffs.  There are a number of similar examples out there.

Over time, you can imagine all kinds of innovative virtual world events.  Imagine, for example, an advanced capability that lets you immerse yourself in a live baseball game and watch it from any location you wish, including from the point of view of a player in the field.  I am not sure what new technologies may be needed to develop such sophisticated applications, but I am pretty sure that they will start appearing in the next few years. 

Architecture, Design and Management       

The last two categories of virtual world applications were first developed in consumer markets.  This next one, is an evolution of engineering and design applications developed over the last couple of decades.

When a new building is being planned, the architects will not only come up with detail drawings of the outside and interiors of the building, but they will typically also develop a scale model of the building and its environment, to give everyone a better appreciation of what it will all look like.  Such high level architectural models are particularly important with major projects, such as the planned infrastructure for the 2012 London Olympics.

Virtual world capabilities are a natural for such projects.  The architects and engineers can develop very detail depictions of their proposed designs and the surrounding environment.  They can invite their clients to walk around the building, go inside, step out and look at it from different angles and distances.  The architects, engineers and clients can all work closely together, exploring different choices until everyone is satisfied.  At the right time, they can also invite a wider community to see the plans to make sure there are no serious objections that might significantly delay the project.

The tools and platforms to develop such high level designs are quite different from what is currently used in Second Life and other consumer oriented virtual worlds.  They will be closer to the kinds of tools used in Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Engineering.

Another important area where visual, human-oriented designs and tools are very important is in the management and operations of such complex engineering systems.  We now have the ability to gather and analyze huge amounts of real-time data in order to better manage a complex infrastructure, whether it is a skyscraper, a manufacturing plant or an IT data center.  Virtual environments are a natural way to present all that information to the people that have to understand what is going on, anticipate problems, and perhaps make a split-second decision in the middle of a crisis.

As an example, earlier this year IBM announced an environment, which collects real-time data from all the different resources in a data center and presents it as a realistic 3-D virtual data center using varying colors and other cues to visually represent what is going on.  This will enable operators to better monitor and manage key measurements like energy usage, server utilization and performance hot spots.  You can easily imagine other application areas where such real-time visual management capabilities could have great value - traffic congestion in a city, electric power grids, an oil pipeline, a refinery, and many others. 

It is much easier to envision a future than to predict how quickly or in what ways it will happen.  There is little doubt in my mind that the virtual world capabilities and applications discussed above will happen, in one form or another.  We need lots of progress and innovation, both at the technical level and to understand what will work best in the marketplace and appeal to people.  Above all, we need both patience and hard work.

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