Business & Games: The Blog

1. We will see an increased number of virtual worlds. Whether they will receive the same media treatment as SL, I doubt it. Second Life might be able to use that to its advantage and if Linden Labs steps up its game they might be the one coming out on top. Though with the sheer number of promising worlds in Beta at the moment the future of SL is completely open.
2. Advertisers and companies will still get it wrong. There will always be a line between those that deem marketing in VR useless and those that see it as an opportunity. Those that do decide to invest will still do it for the wrong reasons. The believe in the potential and many R&D departments will at least look at the metaverse structures, but they overestimate, or underestimate the actual presence of their target audience in Virtual Worlds. This is largely because of the vague numbers the hosts of these virtual environments are still showing the public to ‘feed the hype’. Furthermore companies aren’t ready to contribute to the online communities, they only want to be noticed as a brand.
3. We reach the end of the ‘Trough of disillusionment’ and enter the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’. We will see more and more developers working on improving the metaverse as a whole, both on the inside, the users, as on the outside, software developers. Other companies such as Vodafone starting the mobile SL service, mash ups adding functionality to the metaverse.
4. Increased competition between Virtual Worlds will push innovation. Right now most virtual worlds are still fishing in the same pond, so some worlds will develop their own USPs as Second Life did with their User Generated Content. The focus on either gaming (entertainment), sharing, communities, social networking, business networking and branding will become stronger per world, though this seems a scenario for a later stage.
5. The search for the holy grail continues. Whether Virtual worlds grow or shrink, they are here, and here to stay. The influence of these worlds will come nowhere near the impact the internet had in its early days (if you can see them as two different things) but its potential to be as influential will be attractive to many. The killer-app for these 3d environments is bound to make millions and will attract more investors like IBM and Sun. (Think Google, Microsoft, Sony).

Admittedly these are mostly best case scenario’s but I feel a certain level of optimism is called for in the year 2008 for the metaverse. Even if it won’t reach the level of popularity I expect it to achieve, this will still be the year where we get to see interesting developments. Web 2.0 crawling towards 3d guided by 5 major marketing trends. We will see the foundation to Gartners claim of reaching a VR density of 80% on all broadband users by 2011. For another listing of trends visit Stuart Dredge’s post on the Techdigest.tv blog where he listed his own 20 trends.

Original Post: http://digado.nl/what-to-expect-from-vr-in-2008.html