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Future Enterprise - Virtual Metaverse
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| Written by David Hunter Tow |
The Web will soon host an immersive 3D sensory environment that combines elements of social virtual worlds such as Second Life with increasingly dense geographical mapping applications such as Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth.
Representations of the earth’s natural and urban environments create an increasingly detailed mirror world or model of reality. Combined with virtual worlds, they represent an emerging Metaverse of realised virtual earths.
Such meshing of the virtual and real is already becoming standard within Second Life, using repesentations of the real world with which humans can interact including- a virtual Planetarium, a walk-in weather map straddling the US and an International Spaceflight Museum where visitors can fly alongside life-size NASA rockets- all driven by real world data streaming technologies. Users can create avatars that hover and zoom over a world with computer generated human clones and scenery, social facilities and urban infrastructure and services, including shopping with real convertible purchasing currency.
Future Trends
This increasingly immersive Virtual Metaverse will be accessible in 3D holograms and on mobile media and will also be capable of integrating with augmented reality- a third stream of enhanced reality. Augmented reality is created by mixing real objects and natural spaces with layers of associated computer-generated images and designs.
An architect for example could visualise the impact of a virtual building overlaid on a real landscape or perform a virtual tour around a planned or existing building with a client. Auto designers will see how small changes would affect an existing car body design or surgeons the effects of cosmetic surgery on a real patient.
Such integrated real, virtual and mirror worlds will offer a major creative challenge for the future enterprise- allowing it to amplify its tactical and strategic competitive reach, better manage global resources through logistical virtual simulations and explore novel and radical future marketing scenarios.
There will be many different second earths in our future - within an expanding virtual Metaverse. Businesses are already utilising virtual worlds for simulation and promotional purposes and in the future will develop and control their own cyber worlds. Over time these will overlap, merge, spawn and evolve into a seamless Metaverse with unlimited potential for both the enterprise and humanity.
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