20070309SL.jpgDid you read the lat­est Sony announce­ment about “Home” ? (If not, you can read it here.)
So it seems that we can add another Meta­verse to the list.

Apart from Sec­ond Life that is the most famous vir­tual world there are a bunch of other sys­tems avail­able today. You can have a look at Out­back­on­line, Eve Online, Arti­fi­cial Life and go down to World Of War­craft and so on. There are some cus­tom imple­men­ta­tions of the Sec­ond Life grid that are gain­ing news space in geek blogs as well.

The pro­lif­er­a­tion of these vir­tual worlds is quite inter­est­ing and poses some inter­est­ing questions.

Let’s leave away any tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tion on how will these worlds may inter­act between each other, if they will ever do ?

If the Sec­ond Life par­a­digm was to let you cre­ate a new life in the meta­verse this con­cept may now be expanded to multi-​worlds. Your meta­verse alter ego may live in sev­eral dif­fer­ent worlds at the same time.
Will I be able to use my own avatar in each sin­gle vir­tual world?

The inter­est­ing thing here is that we may end up find­ing nego­ti­a­tions between vir­tual worlds very sim­i­lar to the early diplo­matic nego­ti­a­tions in real life. These nego­ti­a­tion will have to cover pretty much every­thing just like it hap­pens in real world diplo­matic conversations.

This looks to me as an inter­est­ing evo­lu­tion of the meta­verse world.

  • Who will be the ambas­sadors of these worlds?
  • Will each com­mu­nity nego­ti­ate their own issues with com­mu­ni­ties in other worlds?
  • How will the econ­omy evolve in a multi world environment?
  • There will be a com­mon frame­work for a sus­tain­able vir­tual economy?

Actu­ally I dot not have the answer to these ques­tions but this may be an inter­est­ing area of research.
Many of these vir­tual worlds are so dif­fer­ent between each other. It is just impos­si­ble to com­pare Sec­ond Life with World of War­craft, but sim­i­lar worlds may exist in the space. Just look at Sec­ond Life and Sony Home. They do not seem so far away.

Why do I blog this ? It really seems that the num­ber of vir­tual worlds is increas­ing every day. These worlds may really become con­nected in some way and I am very curi­ous about this evolution.

Related posts:

  1. Vir­tual reports and innovation
  2. What do you want from (sec­ond ) life?
  3. Being inno­v­a­tive is an attitude?
  4. Sources of uncon­ven­tional innovation
  5. Inno­v­a­tive TV