Irving Wladawsky-Berger: An Update on Virtual Worlds

1 September 2008
For the last three years I have been quite intrigued by virtual worlds and all the various capabilities we group under this term. I believe they are ushering a new paradigm for user interfaces, as well as a whole round of innovative, more human-oriented, intuitive applications.

While many are excited by these possibilities, others remain skeptical. Virtual worlds continue to be most popular in video games and massively multiplayer online environments. Despite our high expectations, the number of virtual world applications in serious areas like education, business, and health care remains small. Some think that this is just one more example of the kind of hype that the IT industry comes up with from time to time.

Count me among the sceptics. IW-B is a thoughtful and well-informed observer of computing developments, and clearly among the optimists, but even he is having a hard time coming up with anything much.

His suggestions are:
- an online museum
- a course in astronomy
- "scheduled events" (large meetings, in effect)
- training
- watching sports from the player's point of view
- walk-throughs of planned buildings and other architectural designs
- managing complex engineering systems.

This has a certain familiarity. Compare what IW-B is saying with these words:

...you could visit a stadium and sit in your assigned seat and see what the view is like before you buy the ticket. Or you could inspect a piece of furniture from all sides and pay for it through the Internet. You could visit museums and walk through them or play 3-D games.

They came from Jay Kidd, who at the time was working for Silicon Graphics (remember them?). The quote is from San Jose Mercury News, 31 March 1995.

Admittedly, Kidd was speaking before the World Wide Web was in general use (the article refers to "30 million estimated Internet users"). Also, the bang-per-buck of computing power and storage and of networking capacity has gone up enormously in those 13 years.

Even so, it seems we're still waiting for the equipment, or the software, to become affordable enough for systems based around virtual worlds to become commonplace. And until they look likely to do so, makers of enterprise software won't be interested in writing the application programs to exploit them.

I'd love to have inexpensive access to fast immersive interfaces like that portrayed in Minority Report. Also, I'd want them for real work, not time-wasters such as playing games or watching sport. For now, my best chance of seeing something like it on my PC is to play the DVD of the film.

By the way, IBM, for whom Irving Wladawsky-Berger works, set up a virtual worlds group at its research centre in 1989. This future has quite a history behind it.

Finding old news

No, I didn't get that 1995 article from the Web but from my own news archive, which goes back even further. I found it using ISYS Desktop search software. Unlike most mass-market desktop search products, this builds a proper inverted index and therefore permits complex queries, aided by a customisable query interface.

Actually, I didn't need to do anything especially complicated. I just asked for mentions of "virtual world" within the same paragraph as "199x" ('x' being a wild card). This entailed entering each of those two terms in the appropriate fields on the search form. I then looked at the four entries with the highest relevance score, selecting the one above as the most apposite.

Just to see if I could get it from the Web, I Googled on a phrase from the article and found one mention.

Whether I could have done so as my starting point is unlikely. So far as I'm aware, no public Web search engine lets one easily carry out a search even that simple. I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.