I took a trip out to the Friday Center to hear Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who is IBM's VP for Technical Strategy and Innovation. This was part of RENCI's Distinguished Lecture Series. The program was about the coming '3D Internet'.
Dr. Wladowsky-Berger took a different tack from the typical future internet fodder, such as I peddle on this blog, and getting a fresh perspective from a different angle definitely made the trip worthwhile. The whole thing was about the emerging use of virtual environments as a way to interact with the web, implying a progression from the original 'text-and-flaming-gif', through the now mainstream mp3 and YouTube era, to an era of virtual reality and presence through an avatar as illustrated by Second Life. Examples ran from the obvious (for virtual meetings/lectures) through some interesting ideas about changing the online shopping model from catalog -> web to physical store -> virtual store. In the presentation, the idea was to model a real store, complete with sample merchandise and salespeople, in a virtual world. One could shop with their friends, interact with subject matter experts, etc. It's easy to get a picture of that in your mind.
Upon seeing the screen shots of this store model, it struck me that one should not think about directly modeling reality in such a 3D web. It's not about making the 3D web model a store, it's about creating a new store, where, for example, your identity, reputation, and social networks, all come into play. The example was given in the talk of a jazz section in a virtual record store, where you could talk to an avatar of a salesperson about the best (I think it's 'Kind of Blue', but I'm an old-school throwback) Miles album. Why not have the store note the 'section' you are in, and match the interests and reputation of the sales people to the interests of the person visiting the store? Why not make a connection between all of the avatars looking at trip-hop, and let them meet and share? Why not link people in real stores with people in virtual stores? That last idea is one I'm playing with.
The question that did come up at the talk was 'what about mobile web'? And this plays into some things I had been yapping about. How would the mobile web interact with the 3D web conception? Here's one idea...
ITS is looking at Second Life as an educational tool. At the same time, we've been looking at location aware services, GIS, GPS, and the like. Since UNC is building a virtual campus, could we map part of the virtual campus to an actual, physical campus location? Given that, we've got mobile devices with GPS capability, and a heads-up display. Could you integrate the virtual and the physical by navigating around the pit, for example, wearing a HUD, and visualizing the virtual people in the same location? I think this would be a cool demonstration, and given a 10 second look at some of the Second Life docs, it does not seem impossible...
The question becomes 'what could you do with that'? And I think there are a million cool things you could try...
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