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August 28, 2008

What Is the Metaverse and Should HPC Care?

What happens when the physical world meets the virtual world and they fall so helplessly in love with each other that they sweep into each others' arms, get married, and meld into something entirely new and different? Aside from having angry Republicans knocking down the door about the whole definition of marriage thing, what happens is the Metaverse.

As you might guess, my metaphor needs some fine tuning (probably my sense of humor too), but bad humor and analogies aside, the concept of the Metaverse is worth your attention. Originally, the Metaverse concept came from the science fiction book "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. In the book, the Metaverse was essentially the virtual realitization of the Internet – a place where people would gather in a virtual reality environment and interact socially and indeed, on a whole new cultural level.

A non-profit group called the Acceleration Studies Foundation (otherwise known as the ASF) has taken the Stephenson concept of the Metaverse and built on it based on key trends that they see emerging in technology today. As such, they see the Metaverse as "the convergence of 1) virtually-enhanced physical reality, and 2) physically persistent virtual space." In other words, the Metaverse isn't just an online phenomenon – it goes both ways. It's the bleeding of each environment (physical and virtual) into each other to create a whole new thing – what the ASF calls "the junction or nexus of our physical and virtual worlds."

To give tactility to the concept of the Metaverse, the ASF highlights two major paradigms in which people currently (and for the foreseeable future) participate in, which serve to make up base components of it. These two major paradigms include 1) External vs. Intimate, and 2) Augmentation vs. Simulation.

The Metaverse Matrix (Courtesy of the Acceleration Studies Foundation)

Within a matrix of these paradigms (as noted above), the ASF highlights the four key components that make up the early Metaverse. They include 1) Virtual Worlds (Second Life, Millions of Us, World of War Craft), Mirror Worlds (Google Earth, GPS, and other "location-aware" technologies), Augmented Reality (iPhones, wearable computers, RFID, etc.), and what is called Lifelogging (which starts with blogging, Facebook and MySpace, but progresses into some incredibly invasive forms of documenting one's life, including Twitter and moving towards automatic GPS tracking, wearable surveillance cameras, and more.

The so-called Metaverse exists in the space where these four paradigms overlap to create a mutually-reinforcing user experience -- if not a completely new cultural paradigm and way of existing. This should get your attention. As the ASF puts it:

"If these technologies become as commonplace and important as we believe they will, people who choose not to participate may end up as left out of commercial and civic discourse as Web-ignorant people are today."

If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, I don't know what will. Not that I'm insisting that everyone should be afraid of this apparent baptism into technology that we appear poised to dive headlong into (emerging as something wholly different), but fear would be a natural reaction.

So what does this have to do with HPC? Well, aside from the obvious, which should require no explanation on this Web site (this stuff is going to require a whole lot of computing power, storage, etc.), I noticed something that I found rather troubling when I was reading the overview of the Metaverse Roadmap: there is virtually no representation in this emerging space from the HPC community at large, despite the fact that HPC will have to be a major component of the vertebral column that enables the entire thing.

After reading the Metaverse Roadmap overview, and reflecting that much of this information is stuff that I've intuitively guessed at since first marveling at the Internet, it dawns on me that we may be much closer to this hybrid reality than I had ever imagined. Perhaps the time to pay closer attention to developments in this emerging Metaverse context has finally come.

What say you?

Posted by Isaac Lopez - August 28 @ 7:27PM

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Isaac Lopez

Isaac Lopez is the Marketing Director for Tabor Communications.

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