Behold the metaverse emergent

At the end of the October issue of Wired magazine is a travel guide to the virtual game/world known as Second Life. After absorbing the article and accompanying pictures, I leaned back in my chair with my eyes glazed over white from seeing the future. If anyone out there is wondering what the future looks like- it’s Second Life. First of all, Second Life is a metaverse platform because it enables anyone to build their own games inside the game. Second Life could easily be the world that ties all other gaming worlds together. I loved Neal Stephenson’s description of the metaverse in his epic sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, but I couldn’t clearly see how it would evolve. I could imagine what Neal describes in his book, but not the path to get there. Now I think Second Life is the path.

In Second Life not only can you customize your own game world, but you can also make money helping other players do the same. This is an essential point- Second Life is an economic platform and a sustainable business bringing in real money to the players and the company behind the game. This practically ensures its future viability. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, Second Life already has enough traction to be significant. It’s hard to ignore all the stories of real world brands setting up their own environments in Second Life. Then of course there’s also the impressive fact that Second Life currently does over $6 million worth of in-game transactions per month. Now would be the ideal time to jump on board and make some great money by offering innovative in-game products and services. Nearly all the lessons for building innovative stuff in the real world apply to Second Life, except that it’s easier and much less costly to innovate in this new virtual world.

All of Second Life’s success comes despite their use of a fairly low res 3d engine running on today’s slow machines. I can only imagine how compelling Second Life will be as computers speed up and the software evolves. The next step in the metaverse’s evolution will almost certainly involve another piece of software tech I recently discovered which promises to make text chat and even video conferencing seem utterly mundane.

The software comes from a California company called Image Metrics. You can view an impressive demo in this New York Times video. Basically, Image Metrics has come up with a replacement for the old methods of motion capture which consisted of putting little sensors all over an actor’s face like they did to capture Tom Hanks’ performance in the animated film, The Polar Express. Today you simply capture the actor’s performance using a regular video camera. Then Image Metric’s software reads the facial expressions captured on video and maps them to a 3d character. You have to see the video to have the “aha” moment. Within the next few years I totally see using a version of Image Metric’s software on our computers to capture our faces and translate them to our blinged-out 3d avatars in real time.

Imagine, you may have a Big Bird avatar, but those facial expressions that make you, you, will shine through. This means you could conceivably meet only someone’s avatar online and yet learn their true expressions well enough so that when you meet them in real life they are immediately familiar, even though they look nothing like their 3d avatar.

If Ray Kurzweil is right that at some point in the next thirty years, virtual reality will become indistiguishable from the real world, then gaming and virtual representations of ourselves will become one of our primary means of expression. This means that Second Life is well placed to capitalize on what may be the most important economic platform ever invented. Not that I care right now who provides my metaverse self, I’m just excited about the virtual possibilities that are here now in Second Life, as well as the paradigm-shifting ones yet to come.