3pointd is 1 year old too, future predictions for the metaverse?
I am just telling my roadie off because I specifically asked for the blue M&M’s to be removed, but I caught mark wallace’s twitter and subsequent post on the future of the metaverse.
I had a chart I made about 6 years ago with some linkages of technologies and concepts, a sort of mind map for the future. On it I had MMORPG obviously, but I also had 3d printing and Augmented Reality (and a few other things).
The hunt for immersion and escapism is certainly one track that will continue, but the need to add to the world that we already have and connect people and information feels like an important road to take too.
As we have all learned, we talk about virtual worlds, but the people are very real.
We are also still constrained by Qwerty keyboards designed to stop old typewriters jamming, cursor buttons to enable us to move around spreadsheet cells and a mouse to let us resize 2d windows. The commercial games controllers, the wiimote and the ps3 sixaxis are showing that there are other ways to engage with content, we need to re explore the ways to render that content. 3D printers are one very solid way, and real headsup displays and personal awareness projections are another. Many people will look back at the ealry explorations of Virtual Reality and say “but that did not work all those bulky head trackers and data gloves”, but that is no reason to not push forward now that much of the technology has got very much easier and commercial. We also now have killer apps for 3d that are not killing apps such as most of the games have been.
I remember sitting in my room at college, modelling a Lotus Esprit on my Amiga. Creating a flypast movie, a bit of lighting etc. It was an interesting technical and creative challenge, but in some respects there was no point. I could not easily share it. Now we can share anything with almost anyone at any time. There are reasons to share, entertaining, informing and impressing.
So the world has moved on, so we can now bring back all those things tried before and see if they work now, and also invent some new ways of engaging. Its going to be a very interesting year methinks.
April 2nd, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Mind maps - 3d - virtual worlds - flypast - it all sparked something in my mind. Have you seen 3D Topicscape (http://www.topicscape.com )?
See if it adds to your interesting year.
Roy
March 1st, 2008 at 6:19 pm
[...] I noticed a great post by Christian over on the Cisco virtual world blog about the rise of expectation in new interfaces. I think in nearly every pitch I do towards the end I remind people that we seem to have tied ourselves to keyboards, supposedly to stop typewriters jamming, mice for navigation of 2d windows, and a few other metaphors for interaction that we are now in a position to break away from. I wrote some of this last year in a mini predictions post One of the things people always seem to say on entering a virtual world (those who are not metarati or gamers) is the fact it is hard to move around. That may not be the case in reality, but just as people struggled with a mouse and menus and windows 15 years ago, they are doing the same with arrow keys, mouselook and the various other convaluted ways we seek to interact with the computer. Clearly people’s expectation of display devices will be changed by the multitouch iphone, or simple gesture interaction as we see with the wii controller. All that is well trodden technology in some respects now. It has become commercially robust and is now in all our hands to push things forward. Another exciting development and one I am sure we will cover in a lot more depth in the near future is Emotiv. There is a great BBC article on it here and you will notice a certain company mentioned alongside it and those of you at GDC may well have seen it. A very soon to be available commercial device to detect brain patterns and allow us to interact with the machines in yet another way. Combine all these with the augmented reality, projection, headset approaches and we have a very rich set of tools to work with to see how we as humans are able to free ourselves from some of the self imposed shackles we have for interaction. Another article here on Kurzweil’s keynote at GDC hints at an even deeper future Of course, thats not to throw away any of the old ways, we still use command lines where needed, we still use books and print where needed, but having more and richer things more suited to an indivuals neuro linguistic programming stack, or adding in accessibility for all so we can all interact however and wherever regardless of particular limitations can only be a good thing? [...]