So I'm having such a difficult time with this assignment and it's not for lack of enthusiasm. I tried to start yesterday and found myself merely repeating what I wrote in my previous post but in a very contrived Q/A format. I just tried again but it doesn't feel right. I wouldn't mind doing an actual podcast sometime but this is not the way to do if....at least for me. Since the goal of the exercise is to apply some of Doc Wagners ideas to learning, I think I will attempt to focus on that and avoid the formatting efforts that are hampering my flow of ideas. (I sound like I'm conceptually constipated)
The topic that I would like to expand upon is the concept of the metaverse. Dr Wagner talked about how Web 3.0 was the 3-D web combined with the web of things. I find this so freaking fascinating. The metaverse is a phrase coined by Neil Stephenson in his book SnowCrash. (btw. that's the second time in this course my favorite cyberpunk writer has been mentioned. His follow up book, The Diamond Age, was referenced in one of our readings.....find his books and read them..they're great) The metaverse refers to an online universe; a sort of parallel world that exists alongside our meat universe. At the time it was far fetched but it's clear she thinks this is a future reality.
At this time, the best examples of this metaverse are massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest (know as EverCrack b/c of it's addictive nature) and the increasingly popular virtual reality world known as Second Life. While WOW lets you fight trollls and collect gold, Second Life is about networking and simple social interaction (carrying a sword and beheading people you meet in SL is frowned upon) WOW creates a virtual imaginary world, SL creates a virtual real world. People do mundane things in SL. They attend concerts, go on virtual hikes, watch sunsets (there's a beautiful sunset every 4 hours in SL) bu they do them...together. SL is a social virtual world, poeple log on to socialize with other people. Learning is a social function. I think it was the constructivists who first said that, but if you teach, you know it's a truism. SL is a starting point for virtual learning.....it's happening already.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has a 12 x 20 meter virtual island in Second Life that is a giant weather map of the U.S.A. Satelite weather data is fed into SL and constantly updates this virtual 3-D represantation of our nations weather. Students studying weather at University of Colorado can actually walk and fly around "IN" this virtual weather. It's a fully emmersive way to learn a topic. Nearby in the SL universe is another fun learning environment. At the International Spaceflight Museum, visitors can fly alongside life-size rockets, from the huge Apollo-era Saturn V to a prototype of the Ares V, one of the launch vehicles NASA hopes to use to send Americans back to the moon. They can fly alongside satelites or travel around our solar system examining planets. You like tennis? If so, just stroll a virtual tennis court inside Second Life and examine the paths of every serve and volley of a Wimbledon match in progress, reproduced by IBM in close to real time (youtube) Recently, the author of the comic strip Dilbert did a virtual book tour all within the SL world.
This is all cool..........but it's not the metaverse. Yes you can fly around mars, but these are still clunky, pixilated worlds in which you converse in chat form. But that will change...it already is. These social virtual worlds (and there are others besides SL) are incorporating more and more real-world data into their online universe. They become richer by the day.
Now lets think about google earth. Is there ever a week in this class when the ubiquitous G isn't referenced in some way. Google Earth is a "virtual globe" Virtual globes and their 2-D counterparts, Web maps, are getting more personal and immersive. This personalization has been referred to as "neogeography" and it's an explosion of user created content from travel photos, to sketchup representations of landmarks, to simple anecdotal reports, annotated to locations on this virtual globe. A trip to virtual Paris on google earth includes a bunch of information added by folks actually been to Paris. This layering of information is tranforming google earth from a virtual glove to 3-D wikipedia. In my opinion this is the first map of the metaverse. Base maps are just a reference point but these metaverse maps will include reviews, opinions, photos and anything else that we want to add. I can easily imagine a geography class visiting the pyramids via google earth and then exploring all the content at the location. Why not? In a real example, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum worked with google to create a layer that highlights the locations of villiages in Sudan that had been destroyed by the janjaweed. Close up views show destroyed homes and pop-up boxes contain testimony from survivors and some truly horrific photos. Now that's a learning tool. Berlin recently created a full 3-D representation of the cities infrastructure..all within a layer of google earth. You can actually walk right into the Reichstag and into the parliamentary chambers.
While the source code for both these environments is still tightly controlled by their respective owners, programmers can build any auxillary applications they choose....that's what makes both of these worlds so rich...people can build in them, and build out from them. Many folks are talking about a "mash-up" of google earth and second life; ostensibly called, Second Earth. Imagine combining Googles immersive 3-D data with Second life's immersive world...it's within this type of mashup that the metaverse will be born. Pundits predict that within the next 20 years...about the same time it took for the Web to get off the ground floor...this type of metaverse experience will be the standard way in which we think of going online. Today we visit a web site to shop for xmas presents, tomorrow we walk our avatars into an virtual store and inspect the merchandise. Wild huh!!
What set's this metaverse apart from the virtual world of something like WOW or SL is that it will actually be a mirror-world of our world. You can imagine it almost as a data filled, form-fitting net flowing over and around our own real world. And this is where Dr Wagners "Internet of things" concept comes in. As more and more objects input data into this web of information we construct a richer and richer mirror of our world. GPS is virtually ubiquitous, and I can download an iphone app that lets my friends know exactly where I am at all times (why I would ever want to do that is beyond me) so you can see that this tapestry is already being woven. As "things" are developed that send more and more information out into this mirror world, the image will start to gain resolution.........it will become a 3-D internet.
Fantasy worlds like WOW and Second Life won't dissapear (they'll get better) but a new type of "non-fiction" virtual reality will emerge that will become as all pervasive as the 2-D internet has become. Don't believe me! The tech research firm Gartner (authors of the now famous Gartner Hype cycle) predict that by the end of 2011 80% of internet user and Fortune 500 companies will participate in some form of virtual world environment like Second Life. The NOAA created it's Island as a kind of educational amusement park; Weather World, but dozens of hard core businesses are setting up shop in Second Life....including Big Blue (IBM) Caldwell Banker opened a real-estate brokerage where new second life residents can purchase virtual homes. Starwood Hotels constructed virtual prototypes of real hotels they plan to build and used suggestions from SL visitors into the final construction designs. You can download layers for most major U.S. airports that track all commercial flights in and out.
So the concept of combining SL and google earth into a Second Earth hybrid mashup is hella cool on it's own, combine that with a whole bunch of sensors around the real world feeding in real-time visuals, real-time atmospherics, the latest traffic situation, how much of your favorite beer is avialable in your local corner store, and you've got a transformative mirror world metaverse experience. Now make the metaverse accessible to all and you have a place where a teacher can teach anything, to anyone, at any time.
That's my podcast for this week.
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Great post Marc, and very thought provoking. I'm curious though, why does a metaverse need to be based on real world data? I understood your paragraph that starts with, "This is all cool...but it's not the metaverse." to mean that unless something is based on real world data, it's not a metaverse. I've been in and out of online games for years now (yes, years...many, many years) and I've found them to fit your (and Neil Stephenson's) definition of a metaverse as I understand it.
ReplyDeleteYou insinuate that it's not a metaverse if it's clunky and pixelated, but I counter that what makes it a real metaverse is that the people who populate it are interacting in a form analogous to real life. Those analogies can be stretched as far as imagination will allow, but the key is that the participants feel a living connection to each other. It's not about how good the graphics are, or which keys you have to hold down to turn and face your friend. To me it's always been about whether or not, in your mind's eye, you view those around you in your "virtual" world with the same emotion that you would if you were physically near each other. While better physical connections, such as advanced graphics and sound, even touch sensitivity, may make it easier to achieve this, I think that the true measure is whether the connections that you make in one world are as strong as those in the other.
Just my 2cp ;-) (if you get that, you're a nerd like me :P)
Ahem... Why didn't you do a presentation on virtual worlds? What can we say on top of this?
ReplyDeleteI like the NOAA Second Life exhibit a lot, but their hurricane one is really difficult to use. And being a solo tourist in SL is a lot like walking around in a vast wasteland. It is very much a virtual social world.