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Just Ahead: The Web As A Virtual World
Imagine being able to have a digital replica of yourself stroll from one site to another When Google Earth launched in 2005, users were exhilarated to type in their home address, see the earth as if they were floating in space, and then swoop down to view a satellite image of their house or apartment. These days users have moved on to upgrading Google Earth with their own photographs and three-dimensional digital replicas of buildings. But one day they'll be able to alight on a Google Earth street and meet someone else there--and even have a conversation.

That sort of encounter is still a few years off, but it's no pipe dream. Google (GOOG ), Second Life creator Linden Lab, IBM, and a bevy of additional companies are moving toward the day when you can stroll around a 3D Web--and not just their own sites--using a virtual replica of yourself that you've created. They are working to establish technical standards, open to all programmers, that would allow the entire Internet to become a galaxy of connected virtual worlds.

In this future scenario, you could go mall shopping with a gang of friends during a lunch break, even while you remain miles apart. In reality, you'd all be pinned to your work terminals, but on that screen you would be transported to a digital replica of the shopping center. As you walk by a sale at a virtual jeans store, Web cameras in the real store let you see how crowded it actually is, in case a popular item is selling out. Your avatar, set to your body's measurements, tries on the jeans and spins around to show them to your pals. You might buy the pants online or visit the physical store later. Either way, you'd have had a fun afternoon without leaving your cubicle.

Such an advance in technology will require overcoming massive hurdles. The computer interface to take 3D imagery and interaction beyond the confines of Second Life or other virtual simulations will have to be intuitive to users. That would entail breakthroughs on the order of those that took Web pages from static documents to dynamic pages updated in real time and navigated via hyperlinks. "It feels like the early days of the Internet," says Steve Prentice, a vice-president at Gartner Research (IT ). Gartner estimates that by 2011, 80% of Internet users and major companies will have avatars, or digital replicas of themselves, for online work and play.

For all the flurry of excitement, there's still a lot of skepticism among tech experts about whether companies can agree on standards that would allow an open 3D world to exist. After all, look at the battle still raging over the HDDVD and Blu-ray DVD standards. For now, Second Life, There.com, and other virtual worlds are fenced-in spaces where one company calls all the shots. If a consumer creates an avatar or a company creates a virtual storefront, they're stuck in that site. Avatars can't stroll from an American Apparel store in Second Life to Wells Fargo's (WFC ) stand-alone virtual-world bank.

So it could take up to a decade before anything like this becomes mainstream. But companies already are developing new browsers and other technologies that are the baby steps toward making the 3D Net a reality. Linden Lab plans to publish the software code for its servers within a year or two. When it does, developers will be able to modify it to create their own Second Life-like sites and build connections so that a store or other application in one virtual site could interact with those in others, says Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab's chief technology officer. The company has not decided whether it will hand the code to a standards body to oversee or will write it, get it working, and hope to set a de facto standard the way Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) Windows trounced Apple Inc.'s (AAPL ) platform by opening up in the 1980s.

Within 18 months, one of the standards groups, the Web3D Consortium, hopes to launch an avatar that can jump between sites, says Rita Turkowski, the group's executive director. The consortium comprises big companies like Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) and smaller businesses that do 3D modeling for the likes of Shell Oil Co. (RDS ) It is striving to develop 3D objects and scenes that work in a variety of applications through a shared file format called X3D. The interoperable avatar likely will be approved by the I.S.O., an organization that has verified technical standards like the JPEG, a shareable format for digital images, for its 157 member countries.



DRAG-AND-DROP WORLDS
Some virtual-world creators already encourage open technologies. The Multiverse Network Inc., founded by several early Netscape employees, has developed avatars that can move from one world to the next. But people need to use the company's "world browser," which surfs only worlds created using Multiverse software tools. The company's business model encourages experimentation: It gives away the tools so that users can build their worlds for free. More than 200 are in the works. If those worlds generate a profit on digital sales, the company collects 10%. Qwaq, a company based in Palo Alto, Calif., has also developed tools to build virtual worlds, for customers such as Intel Corp. (INTC ) and BPPLC (BP ) (BP ). Different companies, such as a vendor or a supplier, can connect their virtual spaces and drag-and-drop any document, spreadsheet, or Powerpoint presentation from their desktop into the "world" to share with others.

Researchers have very different visions of what a 3D Internet will look like. Most agree it would not eliminate the Web as we know it. Rather, it will be possible to move back and forth between Web sites and virtual worlds, just as we now switch between reading a news article and watching a video clip on YouTube. For searching or reading text, today's sites work fine and will continue to do so. But a 3D Internet could make possible a virtual version of activities you might do in real life with like-minded people. You could buy tickets to a baseball game on a standard Web site, for instance, but then go to a stadium in a separate virtual world to meet up with your friends and watch the game (at a lower price than the real thing, one hopes).

Exploring real estate or anything spatial is another area where 3D might make sense, says Thomas W. Malone, a management professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before booking a hotel room or renting an apartment, you could walk through a realistic digital version of the property and look at it from any perspective you want or check out a few blocks in the surrounding neighborhood. That should be a big improvement over the wide-angle video tours on today's hotel and real estate Web sites.

Still, something as simple as taking your avatar from one Web site to another requires the back-end technology of different sites to communicate in a lingua franca. And portable avatars raise a host of legal considerations about who owns them once they're on the move--the user or the companies that own the originating site. "It may make sense not to move the whole avatar, but just the important characteristics," says Sandy Kearney, IBM's global head of 3D Internet.

Practically speaking, it could mean that when you move from a social networking site such as MySpace (NWS ) into a virtual world like There.com, your list of friends and your basic details (gender, age, ethnicity) move, too. Or it could mean that you appear as a cartoony purple-haired digital person in a social virtual world but that your outfit morphs into a corporate suit when you enter your employer's 3D site.

For now, some companies are focusing on making less complicated digital objects, such as buildings, "moveable" across the Web. In 2006, Google acquired the company that created Sketch-Up, a design tool that lets the masses create 3D objects and import them into applications such as Google Earth. Google Earth also supports a file format called COLLADA, originally developed by Sony Corp. (SNE ) for PlayStation. Now Google, Apple, DaimlerChrysler (DCX ), Nokia (NOK ), Intel (INTC ), and others support COLLADA, too.

Those may turn out to be important first steps toward a broader 3D Web. Google is already working to connect the 250 million users of Google Earth to make it more of a social networking space, says Peter Birch, a Google product manager. Today, enthusiasts chat and network in separate discussion boards and blogs. Tomorrow, they may take that conversation out into the virtual street.