Metaverse 2.0 by Jackson

Clive Jackson of Pelican Crossing, creators of Blink3D software, recently published The Metaverse 2.0 (pdf). Snippets follow

I believe that the Metaverse 2.0 will be cosmopolitan, meaning: it is not a single, monolithic 3D environment like Second Life or There.com. Rather, it will be a vast collection of millions of interconnected 3D environments built using various 3D authoring products.

Metaverse 1.0 started around 1995’s with VRML 1.0 (Virtual Reality Markup Language), continuing with VRML 2.0 in 1997 and Adobe Atmosphere in 2000 and culminating with Active Worlds and Second Life. ... Non-web products like Active Worlds [were] closely followed by Second Life which languished until ... they added an economy and the concept of Intellectual Property. A more recent entrant has been There.com.

In 2007, we are starting to see problems... People are beginning to wonder what’s next and the answer is Metaverse 2.0.

Roadmap to the Metaverse

The Internet in 2016 will be an all-encompassing digital playground where people will be immersed in an always-on flood of digital information, whether wandering through physical spaces or diving into virtual worlds.

That was the general picture painted in a draft report obtained by CNET News.com that summarizes the conclusions of several dozen pundits who met at the first Metaverse Roadmap Summit last May to prognosticate the "pathway to the 3D Web." Snippet from the Meet the Metaverse article by Daniel Terdiman.

The four scenarios -- Augmented Reality, Lifelogging, Virtual Words, and Mirror World -- all reflect differing levels of emphasis on what I saw as the two primary spectra describing the evolution of this technology: augmentation versus simulation, and intimate technologies versus extimate technologies. Here's how they line up, in a graphic first shown at South by Southwest 07:

Image and snippet from Jamais Cascio, of Open the Future. Updated image on Flickr.