Summary: Life is becoming more digital and the digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth.
I was reading a feature about Second Life on the plane and next to me was a man in
his late fifties, named John. As it turns out, like me John was a graduate of Lehigh
University. He was class of 1967, while I was 1994. He'd never heard about Second Life,
but when I explained to him the concept he had a good laugh and then asked: "So is this
for those who did not quite make it in the First Life?" No, I replied, this is quite
different - it's a whole new world. What happened next was probably even more surprising
than the fact that we went to the same school. John said to me:
"You know it would be really cool if the airlines conducted computerized tours of the places that we are flying over. It could be powered by GPS and we could see a mix of maps and videos about all these places."
I thought that was a neat idea. But what struck me even more is the fact that it came from (nearly) 60 year old civil engineer. At that moment I no longer had doubts - our future is digital. Digital Life and Life Digital are going to be two parallel paths that we will take over the next decade. Both of them will mix Life and Digital to challenge and change the way we think about ourselves and our world.
For the purpose of this post, we define Digital Life as a collective of the virtual world technologies that are bringing life to the digital realm. All of them create environments where participants live in a digital form. These worlds mix the real and imaginary, they both follow and break the laws of physics. They have concepts of markets and money. They have cities and islands. Most importantly, they are unique venues for innovation and self-expression.
Linden Labs' creation Second Life is currently the
leader in the Digital Life space. With close to 8 million inhabitants, Second Life has
received much media attention in the blogosphere and mainstream press. It is appealing
because of its rich design, which elegantly blends real world-like features with fantasy
and game elements. But Second Life is very different from virtual world video games -
because it is not a quest. You are not chasing anything and nothing is chasing you. The
core of Second Life is social.
As in real life, you can walk around and talk to people. You can drive cars, climb stairs and even purchase things - most importantly, you can buy land. Commerce is one of the secret sauces in Second Life, since (as the song goes) money makes the world go around. The official currency of Second Life is Linden dollars, which is convertible to and from the dollar - so any user can participate. Together these social and commercial aspects of Second Life make the world realistic and engaging.
But the characters in Second Life are unmistakably digital. Since you can fly with a touch of a button, geographical boundaries are inconsequential. You have a complete map of the world; people have tooltips with names above their heads; pointers, posters and advertisements are all based on rich media. There is really nothing like this in our physical world. This collective digital experience is unusual and exciting, stimulating and thought-provoking.
There is little doubt that worlds like Second Life are going to be increasingly more engrossing. At the end of the spectrum of possibilities, we can imagine wearable technologies that enable total submersion into a virtual world. This is not happening anytime soon, because of the complexity involved in mimicking human sensory experience. In the mean time, virtual worlds will take smaller steps - like adding voice communication and trying to scale to the increasing demand.
The second focus of this post is what I will call Life Digital
- a set of technologies that aims to put a digital mesh on top of our reality.
Futuristically speaking, we are talking about magic glasses that overlay digital
information on top of real-world scenes as you walk around. The closest modern version of
this technology is Google Earth - a detailed 3D
visualization of the Earth.
Even though Google Earth is a simulation, one of its main functions is to augment geographical information with digital information. In a way, you can think of the program as tagging each place on Earth with all sorts of relevant information.
The precursor of this technology was destination software, like Vindigo, which brought restaurant reviews, movie guides and destination reviews first to PDA's and later to cell phones. Using this technology, you could punch in an address and a kind of cuisine - and get a list of restaurants in response. The difference now is that information is tied to exact physical coordinates and there is much more of it - the world wide web!
But where these technologies become really interesting is when you combine them with cameras inside cell phones. Imagine going out to your back yard, pointing to a tree and asking: What kind of tree is this? or imagine walking around in a new city, pointing to a building and getting its complete history.
Tagging and annotating our physical world with digital tags and other kind of digital information will make our world much richer. Perhaps the device that is capable of creating this experience today is the much hyped iPhone. It certainly has all the ingredients to make it happen - it is the matter of connecting the dots.
Life is becoming more digital and digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth. In both cases digital information is breaking geographical boundaries and overcoming the limitations imposed by our physical world. Flying in second life has the same affect as linking a Wikipedia entry to the Grand Canyon as rendered in Google Earth.
Information is being unleashed and re-shuffled. We are beginning to look at information from literally a 1000 foot view. And everything is becoming increasingly more connected. This is both very exciting and a bit unnerving. We are accelerating into our digital future from all directions - pushing digital towards life and pushing life towards digital.
Do you agree that this is happening? Please share your experiences with virtual worlds and annotated reality.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Digital Life vs Life Digital: Our Inevitable Digital Future.
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I wrote this earlier as a point for "Predictions for 2007" post:
"While social networks dominated 2006, we wonder if the amount of time an average user spends online will start to negatively impact on their social lives in 2007 and lead to a downturn. Could social networks prove to be anti-social? ;-)"
Posted by: Ebrahim Ezzy | July 5, 2007 7:55 AMGood post. Looking at Life Digital I'd say we're starting to get pretty darn close to those cheesy movies. When you combine things like Microsoft's Surface with the iPhone, 3G wireless etc etc. Wearable computers of old obviously aren't going to be the way forward.
The way I see things working is like this: Surfaces start gaining acceptance and start being used as billboard and that kind of thing for more personalized advertisements.
On the technophile person it could work like this. I have the latest D&G hyper-reality sunglasses on. These have a built-in HUD, 4G wireless and connect to a Google Reality service. Information is being passed back and forth between the glasses and the service, GPS indicating my position. At anytime I can bring up the ARD (Augmented Reality Display) which gives me little bits of information overlayed on the real things. The same camera system can also detect my hands, so I can "point" to the name of a business and bring about a summarized piece of information, reviews, etc. Google is already getting this data with their new local review service.
Would it be that useful? Maybe not when I'm trying to a pizza place, but if I'm visiting a new city and can have directions, etc overlayed on my vision it's like having a personalized tour guide with me at all times. Hell, you could even sell personal tour guide packages! Premium services :)
Posted by: Omar Ismail | July 5, 2007 9:29 AMI couldn't agree more! For what you call 'Life Digital' I introduced the term 'VIRREAL' (see www.almarvanderkrogt.nl/blog).
There is a strong momentum building, especially with tools like Twitter.com (with microformats for location) and Plazes.com, which will virally tag the world.
My goal is to actually channel some of these forces to create 'WEBMARKS'; entities on top of the real world that gain importance through their existence.
This could mean that, in addition to the features you mentioned (like providing historical information when you point your phone to a building) virtual elements are added: e.g. artwork, visual information streams or additional visual context.
So maybe the next wave is cultural after being social.
Posted by: Almar van der Krogt | July 5, 2007 9:50 AMinteresting post, seems that the cyberpunk vision of rpg games like shadowrun will become true. It describe an Augmented Reality, where the virtual world can be a layer of the real world, and it's really very close to happen.
Posted by: speedyop | July 5, 2007 2:39 PMImagine yourself wandering in a shop. Each item is tagged with RFID technology, your cellphone (or sunglasses) can read this tagg, surf the web and display more information about it : the best price in town, the reviews from other consumer and so on...
Great post. Might want to check out the Metaverse Roadmap assembled by the Acceleration Studies Foundation at metaverseroadmap.org
Posted by: Alvis | July 5, 2007 4:56 PMInteresting post. Also I remember this presentation our company did at Cannes this year.
http://www.tribalddbnewsletter.com/0706/when_worlds_collide_video.htm
Posted by: Vincent | July 6, 2007 3:20 AMI think this is a good post. I met yesterday with a very interesting company doing something that I think a lot of people will be excited about in the future. I can't say anything because they've not launched yet, but it was cool, cool virtual stuff.
Posted by: Patricia | July 6, 2007 8:13 AMGood article.
there are a couple of points I'd like to add. Virtual experiences are here to stay. We are at the earliest stages of understanding how our relationship to 3d visualizations and data as content is going to evolve. Virtual Experiences are currently defined by a small set of features: the world as a social network, the environment of discovery, game play and status and in economic terms the value and sale of virtual assets ( gold mining, assets creation, etc.)
One of the major areas for improvement is in interface design. Perhaps as touch screen and gestural technology makes its way towards our homes and finger tips, being in a virtual world will involve a more tactile fidelity, but over all 3d space as an interface is a challenge. It currently requires all kinds of 2d assets to support it.
The virtual experience has two major propositions to its audience. First its immersive and secondly it's aspirational. Display technology, like Headplay, will certainly make being "in-world" much more immersive. The aspirational component is a little more complex in that it has all kind of social and cultural dependencies.
The last issue to touch up on is the very nature of the content itself. Studies are showing that virtual time is taken directly out of television viewing time. Consider the fact that WOW has somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 million users. Compare that to 22 million viewers watching Lost or Desperate Housewives.
I am wondering how the future will integrate the social, spacial and environmental aspect of VE with our love for narrative and the ability to "author & design" the context and the experience
:)
Posted by: snaughton | July 6, 2007 1:15 PMYep, the future is going to be pretty weird when virtual worlds meet the real world out on the streets. "Did you see that guy?! Oh, wait, he was just a figment of my head's up display."
I wholeheartedly second Alvin's recommendation of the recently published Metaverse Roadmap Overview at http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/ to anyone interested in these topics.
In the terminology of the Metaverse Roadmap, the "Life Digital" of this post is simply called "Augmented Reality" and "Digital Life" is called simply "Virtual Worlds". The Roadmap also throws in a couple of interesting twists: "Life logging" and "Mirror Worlds".
Personally, I'd reserve the term "Digital Life" for self-replicating nanobots and computer viruses, or maybe for the point when we get uploaded into the digital god ...if that that isn't google reading our blogs already. Second Life is still pretty dependent on pink fleshy matter driving it, so for me doesn't count as life. (Not that I don't like and appreciate the poetry of this post's title.)
One other thing: the iPhone is critically missing GPS apis, so I don't know how much cred Apple should be getting for enabling the Augmented Reality metaverse we are all so excited about. (How about the Nokia N95 though?)
Posted by: Mason Lee | July 6, 2007 4:58 PMCheers! Great blog.