With grateful thanks to John Hengeveld of Intel and others for many concepts and wording

Heady Times for Early Adopters

The early years of a technology is frequently characterized by a boisterous cacophony of players. Each player has a dream, but to realize that dream, they have to build everything from the ground up and develop their own platforms. Early consumers of technologies are limited to a small group blessed with the patience, wealth or time (or all of the above) to deal with the gaps in these home grown gadgets to get something to work. Automobiles went through this phase as did personal computers. The medium of Virtual Worlds finds itself there now.

Slowly, through gradual or mass extinction, industry players disappear or merge together and one or more monopoly powers emerge. Concentration of resources and marketing prowess then creates the basis for mass adoption. This happened in the 1930s with the telephone company once affectionately known in the USA as Ma Bell.

The close cousin of virtual worlds, online game worlds, finds itself further down the road to maturity with several big commercial successes under its belt. Game play worlds have settled into a model not unlike the film studio system of the 1920s, with aggregation of talent around big projects producing a few “hits” generating large returns. The game world studios must always be working on the next potential hit as current box office returns fade to black.

Stuck on Max Headroom Island

In the 1980s, before the coming of the Internet as an “intentional but accidental” common layer to access information, online systems of all kinds existed, having their own custom browsers and file systems. E-mail systems, SGML document stores, academic abstract databases all lived happily in their own walled gardens and none experienced much growth. The creation or imposition of a common layer of technology both underneath and on top of information brought maturity, profitability, and the freedom to innovate to a wide swath of the software industry.

Ironically, both social virtual worlds and game play worlds today exist as a kind of 1980s Back to the Future meets Max Headroom island universe within the 2000s internet. These platforms feature expensive, custom built browsers accessing content and serving experience through proprietary servers. As a result, ventures must constantly re-invent the wheels, engine block and body of their virtual world vehicles. In this world, the cost of innovation is high, the reach of solutions is bounded and the value they provide are self limited

From the Islands to the Mainland

So how do virtual worlds, which have far less resources than their more massive cousin the game worlds, plot their course from this isolated archipelago within the Internet and journey to the mainland?

One way for this to happen is to let market forces do the captaining.  Let one or more monopoly players emerge, enforcing a common standard. In this case we don’t have to do anything but sit back and watch. The risk we run is if no healthy monopoly emerges and we enter a new “winter” period (see my previous Terra Nova posting at http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/06/possibility-of.html).

Another way is to create the conditions for growth is by encouraging cooperation to lower the barriers to creation and adoption of virtual worlds. Does this kind of cooperation have a precedent? Yes! In the late 1970s, Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet at Xerox hit the road promoting TCP/IP as an open networking standard. He faced an uphill battle against entrenched technologies but he prevailed and we live in Metcalfe’s world today. Metcalfe’s force of personality, some lucky accidents, and a healthy dose of self interest pushed TCP/IP over the tipping point by the early 90s, just in time for the spread of the Internet to the masses.

So one could create efforts to encourage standards, but at what level? Standards of interoperability have been promoted for virtual worlds for over a decade, starting with the Avatar Standards track at Earth to Avatars in 1996, and more recently with an effort to create interoperable avatars between major platform providers (see OpenSim and the Open Virtual Worlds project).

However, the history of Instant Messaging provides a clue at how successful interoperability can be at this “highest” application level: efforts to provide cross-platform IM have all ended up on the rocks. It seems that creating common layers is more difficult the higher up one goes in the application space. What about examples of low-level interoperability? HTTP and various open web server technologies like Apache are the very definition of interoperability at the technological ocean bottom. How about the recent open source or open standards virtual worlds efforts? Would they, given sufficient resources, provide a common layer upon which a wide range of platforms could be built? Could Second Life, There, IMVU, Active Worlds and other existing platforms successfully unhook from their current servers and connect to a new one? Or are these platforms too tied to complex interaction and optimization to be able to be unhook? And what if some of these companies survive through sales of their proprietary servers?

The Invasion of the Small Worlds?

There may be another approach piloting our way over the horizon, that of the coming of ubiquitous “small worlds”. Small worlds are a concept coined recently by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer in describing The Palace, a mid 1990s lightweight 2D avatar platform. Small worlds typically have small, easy to install and run programs or plug-ins serving lightweight spaces hosting a small number of users. These are in turn connected to a larger grid of small spaces (or Web of Worlds as recently suggested by Intel’s John Hengeveld), sometimes served peer-to-peer. Will Harvey’s IMVU is an example of a new small world platform. Small worlds could exist in close connection to the web, especially embedded within social networking sites like FaceBook, and draw traffic from the natural flows over its pages. In contrast the walled-garden “Big Grid Iron” worlds exist in isolation from the web and its click-link traffic patterns.

But would small worlds get us to the mainstream mainland?

The Small Gobbles Up… Everything!

As we can see from the history of computing, it is often the case of “the small gobbling up the big, and everything else”. Trivially small, lightweight yet rapidly replicating platforms often grow up to become all-encompassing solutions. DOS grew up to become Windows and along the way the PC triumphed over the time-shared mainframe, minicomputer and workstation. Could it be that there is some small world platform out there that is destined to become the standard? Dick Gabriel of Sun Microsystems has written much wisdom and books on this phenomenon (http://www.dreamsongs.com/Books.html) in which he posits that one of several ways to create a virally spreading success is to hitch your wagon to something that is already growing. Does this mean that a small world embedded in Facebook or some other social network(s) is the answer?

There is another wave about to break across the internet that will change everything (including virtual worlds). That is the coming of powerful front end user interface frameworks that will take us well beyond Web 2.0. One such framework is Adobe’s AIR (http://www.adobe.com/products/air/) which merges Flash, Actionscript, AJAX, a SQL database and many, many other goodies. Small worlds in AIR are definitely on the way. AIR may remove significant barriers to developing virtual world front-ends. The ubiquity of Flash suggests that you would be hitching your wagon to an already big success.

But What in the World is a World Good For?

So there may be a glimmering of some ways forward on the technology side, but what about the applications? What in the world is a (virtual) world good for? Creating a widespread, ubiquitous platform requires profound understanding of what people will find useful. The Home Brew Computer Club members had little idea of what would appeal to the average household having a personal computer. Club members like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others built their empires on finding and holding on to a clear picture of that understanding. Game worlds are balkanized into genres, but each genre typically has enough of a market to create a sustained “hits” business. Virtual worlds genres are only now being defined, and they fall into two categories: spaces where people engage in random or purposeful social interaction, and everything else. Given that social networks on the Web are a blend of random and purposeful group interaction (think Twitter), it seems that the biggest “footprint” of user attention is by this time well understood.

Other "serious" genres in the virtual worlds camp might include learning spaces, business conferencing, commerce supporting spaces, media sharing spaces, and purpose-built events. Other smaller but self-sustaining genres could include grant-supported artistic worlds, and industrial worlds such as used in project development (architecture, urban planning, CAD/CAM) or training (military and non-military). Am I missing anything?

It may well be that the genres and sub-genres are so different that no one common technology platform or business model can serve them all. Today CAD/CAM companies and their platforms are so highly developed, expensive and specialized that it is hard to ever see them using some kind of common 3D platform or format (other than for file interchange).

Virtually Eternal

The best way forward, therefore, might be to concentrate on the platform that has 1. the biggest footprint of potential adopters and 2. the lowest barrier to those users adopting the platform. I posit here that the obvious answers to one and two is:

1. Social interaction both random and purposeful is the big user footprint available to virtual worlds especially when embedded into high-trafficked web-based social networks and
2. The small world form factor using already ubiquitous front end technology would naturally be the lowest barrier to entry to these users.

We would then have to have the faith that properly managed  such a platform would “grow up” to serve more and more virtual world genres. One persistent visionary player therefore might develop a widely adopted small world platform and insinuate itself into any social virtual world platform. Bill Gates and Paul Allen managed to get Microsoft BASIC on every microcomputer around and later built a powerful monopoly upon that strength by procuring DOS for IBM. On the back end, perhaps adopting a simple, yet open virtual worlds server, open-sourced like Apache, could smooth the pathway to ubiquity.

Could “eternal life” for virtual worlds be in the offing once a ubiquitous web-embedded "small world" platform come into being?

Is it Time to Invite the Players to a New Poker Game?

Builders of large grid-based virtual worlds with proprietary and heavy browser technology may be doing well enough to not be interested in an approach more likely to create mainstream adoption. The Big Grid-Iron worlds approach may be enough sustain a company or two but this is not sufficient to create a healthy industry.

Small worlds companies with venture funding may soon be rising up to duke it out in the social networking browser space. Comprehensive ubiquitous client framework suppliers like Adobe may have inkling that small worlds could generate some kind of positive pull for their efforts and willing to consider features that would make small worlds really run well there. Corporate grant funders, academic institutions and government agencies might be willing to fund a free, open Apache-like back end server if they could see a longer term research return.

Back in 1995 I established an organization, the Contact Consortium (http://www.ccon.org), whose charter was to bring together all of the groups and people building and using the first online virtual worlds platforms and stimulate the development of the medium. Is it time for a new Consortium effort? One could envision inviting key players to a common poker game where the payout at the end of the evening might be a common small world platform tuned to the biggest user footprint and adopted by the biggest trafficked social networks?

The stakes in this game are a new medium and a healthy industry and… social virtual worlds everywhere!

Anyone ready to deal?