The bleeding edge of our increasing connected world is immersive visual collaboration. The telepresence technology that the Lab religiously covers represents a significant step towards bringing a more realistic conference environment to the business world. Yet as immersed as telepresence makes its participants feel, this environment still takes real, tangible people and connects them through technology. But what happens when we go beyond merely connecting people and instead create digital avatars of ourselves and meet together in a separate world? What if those avatars so closely resemble ourselves that they begin can begin to appear alongside us in reality without being detected? The short answer: the line between computers and reality evolves.

How did this start?

The beginnings of this transformation find their roots in the world of video games from the late 1970s and early 80s. Early attempts at creating alternate universes in a digital domain were called MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions). Essentially, a MUD creates a textual fantasy world where players assume hierarchical roles and attack one another. The famous Zork game of the 1980s was one of the first commercially successful MUDs. Not exactly physically immersive experiences, but, in creating these worlds from dreams of digital Dungeons and Dragons, these MUDs represent the first alternate digital universes where people could interact with 'each other' through avatars.

As graphical horsepower caught up to the imagination of the dork underground over the next 10 years, these text based worlds became Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). Essentially based upon the same ideas as their MUD counterparts, MMORPGs turned the text-based fantasy worlds of MUDs into graphical wonderlands that actually showed the environment. Famous titles like Everquest and World of Warcraft reached millions, fueled by wider adoption of the internet as the 90s progressed.

Stepping into the Metaverse

Young lady in Second Life buying the skin for her avatar [via 2nd Look Gallery (Chip Midnight)]

Building on the success of MMORPGs and the second-generation, higher-speed internet, entire virtual 3D worlds worlds like Second Life have now sprung up. What separates these virtual worlds from their MMORPGs partners is that the user, not the producer of the title, defines the environment and the avatars (see image above). There is no real goal to achieve in this 'game'; in that sense this is a digital world of avatars interacting with each other just for the sake of doing so, creating a metaverse (The metaverse is a concept created in the cyberpunk epic Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - an incredible book you really need to read for both pleasure and to understand what is to come).

An image taken from Sony's virtual world for the PS3, Home [via kotaku.com]

Second Life is not alone in creating a virtual world. Perennial big dog on the block, Sony, is set to introduce their own virtual world called 'Home'. Home is still currently in development but beta testing has begun and the finished product should be ready for the Playstation 3 platform later in 2007. The beastly Cell processor that runs the PS3 gives Home best-in-class graphics (pictured above). Sony is combining social networking capabilities like sharing video and instant messages with their own virtual world to create something above what even Second Life is offering.

Connecting You to the Metaverse

Trying to help you direct your avatar through the metaverse is complicated with only a keyboard and mouse so a new company called Emotiv was formed to help fill the void. Their newest product, Project Epoc, uses an electro-encephalograph (EEG), pictured, to transmit neural data between the user and computer. It can transmit facial expressions, most user movements and even emotional states to help close the gap between the real world and virtual worlds, a use its founders specifically had in mind during the design process. Despite some criticisms of the technology, it has been shown to be functional. You can watch the system in action below:

Are you real?

As the technology to create an alternate world and use your brain to interact with it has now become reality, so has the technology to reverse the whole process and bring the first 'human avatars' - human reproductions of digital beings - into our reality. In March 2007, The University of Florida, Bradley University in Illinois and The University of Waterloo in Canada jointly held the first play to incorporate an actor who was seamlessly 'beamed' onto multiple sets around North America.

The main actor in the play, pictured above in Florida, had a computer on his person that was processing and sending his movements to both Canada and Illinois. His movements were being recreated at the other locations in real time as he performed them. With the aid of special lighting and 2D effects, all stages made it appear that both the real and avatar actors were there together on the same stage. Professor James Oliverio of the University of Florida College of Fine Arts appropriately added,

"We are now dealing with a 4D experience, where time is the fourth dimension. The innovation is that the virtual world is woven so tightly into the live, onstage physical performance that it forms a holistic whole for the audience."

John's Thoughts

A conceptual metaverse where humans take the form of digital avatars has actually come into reality alongside the technology to reproduce digital avatars back into reality. While both implementations are still crude, they exist and it lends us all a window into the future.

The first inklings of our digital world began from a military project that was simply trying to design a system that was able to cope with nodes failing and after 30 years was still only a disconnected basket of USENET groups, scientific listservs, and ISP portals. It was only after the system was opened to outside development that this patchwork was woven into a connected universe we now call the Internet. As Second Life opens their architecture to user-defined development and actively competes against other lesser-known virtual worlds like Kaneva and Sony's Home, these disconnected pieces will eventually coalesce into a metaverse, much like the internet did ten years prior.

Telepresence appears to be a vital 'gap' technology between our current internet and this evolving metaverse. Since the metaverse cannot yet produce a 3D avatar that could conduct a realistic meeting, telepresence essentially mimics this behavior over the internet by stuffing super high-end 2D video across tier-1 pipes. Once the network of telepresence studios is more fully built out on a worldwide level, the result will be nearly instantaneous communications with anyone, anywhere - much like Stephenson outlines in the metaverse of Snow Crash.

Cool graphic from David Armano

Together, this basket of revolutionary telecommunication technologies is transforming our world by undercutting the static, vertical hierarchies that were required to maintain order in a disconnected world. The shift to horizontally aligned organizations can be viewed as the ultimate disruptive technology of the 21 century. Everything from the destruction of the American manufacturing sector and the subsequent rise of Chinese economic power to the unfortunate success of asymmetrical terror-based warfare against vertical aligned armies underscores just how seismic this shift is.

Cyperpunk dystopias like Neuromancer, Blade Runner and Snow Crash represent one view of our hyper-connected future we should learn from in advance. The pace with which this technology is accelerating far outpaces our ability to predicts its ultimate impact on our lives. We have already seen what the instantaneous textual information of the internet has done. We are about to bear witness to what truly immersive instantaneous communication via telepresence can do and we are standing at the precipice of what true immersion into a metaverse will do. In the wrong hands, such technology could be used as a powerful weapon but we can still name-our-own-adventure because the game has just begun. Knowing that all this incredibly disruptive technology is coming makes it our responsibility to institute the proper safeguards that ensure those that come after can enjoy the same standard of living our freedoms provide us today.

Further Reading:

• Connecting your Brain to the Game by [via Technology Review]
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• Virtual Actors Take to the Stage by Jennifer Viegas [via Australian Broadcasting Company]