Caleb Booker

Late last month I was going back and forth with Eilif Trondsen of SRI-BC about what the top virtual world trends were in 2008. Sadly, I was completely swamped at the time and wasn’t able to do a real breakdown in the blog.

Let’s get that done now, shall we?

Trend #1 - Terminology Stabilizes

I used the term “Metaverse” in the title almost as a joke, really. Like “Cyberspace” and “Information Superhighway” before it, the term hit the point of over-use awhile back, which was quickly followed by almost complete disuse. “Web 3D” made a valiant fight for mindshare, but only IBM’ers really pushed for it and we haven’t even heard them say it in a few months. It’s called “Virtual Worlds” now, that’s it.

Why does this matter? Simple: if there’s a common term for it, then people will feel like it’s something worth knowing about. In a sense, settling on a single name for a concept is the final and most critical step in legitimizing all that is being done in the field.

Trend #2 - Adoption by the Medical Industry

I don’t know if anyone saw this coming at all, but the facts are undeniable. If you just look back through the Business in Virtual Worlds News Roundups, which I’ve only really been doing since August, you’ll see a steady stream of training programs for medical students, nurses, and paramedics.

But it’s more than training. The dissociative nature of 3D spaces is now widely used to help patients work through post-traumatic stress disorder, and to analyze their own behavior from various perspectives to see if maybe they can “see themselves” doing things in healthier ways in the future.

Trend #3 - Rapid Prototyping

So useful and economical it’s fast becoming a standard, virtual worlds are great places to try out new designs in front of consumers, grab instant feedback, and work out the kinks before you’ve even built your first prototype in the real world. The fashion and medical industries are the biggest adopters of this concept, with several large-scale projects having been launched.

One significant missing link here is the auto industry. While it would be downright odd for an auto manufacturer not to have a virtual presence of some kind, none of them seem to be distributing concept cars for us to take out for a test drive. The most likely reason: Second Life physics are still glitchy, and even if they did work it would be difficult to accurately simulate how a car accelerates/decelerates/corners. They’d let us drive concept cars in video games, but most game makers want already-popular cars in there.

Trend #4 - Linden Lab Changes Just Enough To Maintain Lead

This was a really close call. For a long time Second Life seemed like it was ready to implode, largely due to the fact that Linden Lab has always had notoriously terrible customer relations. (With some significant exceptions. We love you Torley!) Their festivals are regularly handled in just such a way that the residents are infuriated, their marketing group make themselves completely inaccessible, and technical development priorities have always seemed a bit upside-down.

The appointment of Mark Kingdon as the new company CEO, however, has brought many positive changes. The whole Second Life Grid process is making more sense, the messages from the company have been much more straightforward, and priorities seem to have been set in order. While you won’t ever see a blogger telling the world how happy they are that nothing terrible has happened to them in awhile, overall people are starting to fall back into the groove of things. It has been a year of chaos, no doubt about it, but the past few months have been good ones.

Expect proper enterprise support soon. Things seem to finally be coming together there.

Trend #5 - Collaboration Becomes Key

Platforms like Twinity and ExitReality have been really showing us lately how a 3D space can be enhanced by enabling other people’s technologies and promoting other companies. With the massive number of virtual worlds out there these days, strategic partnerships are what makes or breaks a company, and we’re seeing some fantastic collaborations these days that truly enhance the user experience.

These two worlds are also forerunners of a sub-trend: web browsers in worlds, and worlds in web browsers. How important is that long-term? Jury’s still out; we may know by the end of 2009.

Trend #6 - The Virtual World “Market Correction”

This was one of the biggest years ever in virtual worlds, but there was a good deal of attrition as well. The fact is that many companies jumped in and played around without really knowing what they wanted to accomplish in the first place. They spent months trying to get a little mindshare as a forward-thinking company, but they had no way to measure success. If you don’t know when you’re succeeding, the whole enterprise gets difficult to justify no matter how much hip nerdcore jargon you have at your fingertips.

There were enough companies in this situation that when one finally gave up and left many others followed suit. To the casual observer it looked like a “mass exodus”, and many a short-sighted pseudo-intellectual editorial clogged our newsreaders.

Those who were seeing concrete return on investment paid little attention, and the steady growth of the industry continued unabated.

Trend #7 - Events, Meetings and Conferences

Clever Zebra’s activities aside (we’ve been around just a bit too long to be considered a “2008 trend”), we’re seeing a number of other fledgling virtual event companies launch. While this usually involves them launching with a single regular customer, the fact is that it’s becoming understood in the events industry that they absolutely must adopt this type of technology. It’s often so much more practical than flying people in from all over the world.

We’re seeing a good number of new event-focused web technologies as well. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make my analysis of these tools public any time soon, but for now I’ll just say that this is an exciting time to be working for a company like Clever Zebra!

Trend #7 - Virtual Recruiting

Job fairs in virtual spaces are pretty common now for a simple reason: they get results. Human Resources professionals often report high numbers of extremely well-qualified applicants that they would normally have to pay a head-hunter thousands to track down.

It’s not just tech jobs either: more than one police department has successfully recruited through Second Life this past year, and the US Army has been making efforts in this area as well. Virtual worlds are now an essential to any recruiting drive.

Trend #8 - Productivity

Zebra Corporate and Qwaq have been around for awhile and are well-developed solutions, but we’re seeing some new entries into this area as well. The general trend is to simply make these spaces useful for the average employee’s work-flow. We’ve seen some good successes here, as well as some miserable failures from some of the more short-sighted companies out there. The real big stuff in this area will come in 2009, but 2008 saw a great deal of behind-the-scenes development.

Trend #9 - Mixed Reality

Importing massive data sets, maps, video feeds, and live audio into virtual spaces became common somewhere in 2008. Output into the real world became equally as common, sometimes in the form of control commands for large systems, other times in the form of data overlay on a camera display. Here’s a quick tech demo of what I’m referring to:

Trend #10 - Here Come The Feds

The military were the earliest adopters of virtual worlds, but now we’re seeing every branch of the government building presences. From Taxation to Legislature to the Post Office, everyone is laying a virtual foundation for big things in the future. Watch NASA this coming year - they’ll shock you!

The Obvious Stuff Others Can Write Full Articles About When Stumped For Better Ideas

• Lots of worlds launched.
• Graphics got better.
• Gadgets abound.
• Toy manufacturers picked up on MTV’s product promotion worlds and started building hundreds of kids worlds.
• Non-Profits find big audiences regularly. (See Global Kids, Relay For Life, etc. etc.)

Stuff People Mistake For Trends

• Second Life in mass exodus - no, not at all. We are seeing some older residents leaving, but this is really about the law of averages: there are many, many older residents. They can’t all stay forever.
• The failing economy crushed the industry - actually no. That’s just hype. Things seem to be trotting along just fine as a matter of fact, with venture capital firms injecting a sane and sober amount of millions into the industry on a pretty regular basis.
• Google is leaving, so it was all a “fad”. Well, no, clearly it’s not a fad. If anything, this indicates that there’s something really wrong at Google. Why haven’t they leveraged that massive 3D library of theirs yet? They spent the whole year just sitting on it.

Looking Forward

Hmmm… maybe in another blog entry. Check back next week. What are your predictions for 2009?

Posted on December 27th, 2008 under business, history, new media, virtual worlds. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.