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Press Releases
ACCELERATION
STUDIES FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES AMBITIOUS JOINT RESEARCH
PROJECT;
FIRST COLLABORATION TO PUBLICLY ROADMAP THE METAVERSE
ON A RECURRING BASIS
- Living Forecast to Be Created by 3D Web and
Virtual Worlds Communities -
Mountain View, Calif. April 19, 2006
– Today's advancing 3-D virtual worlds,
massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), 3-D
and video plug-ins, geospatial browsers, and social
networking platforms are just five of a broad
range of technology, economic, and social trends
converging to transform today's internet into
tomorrow's 3-D "metaverse," a transparently
connected encapsulation of and progression beyond
the current possibilities of the offline world.
The Acceleration
Studies Foundation (ASF), a nonprofit futures
research group, as announced the Metaverse Roadmap
Project (MVR), a first of its kind collaborative
effort designed to generate a 10-year scenario,
possibility, and challenge document for the development
of the 3D Web. Relying on input from key web pioneers
and experts currently spearheading projects at
companies like Google, Sony, Multiverse and Linden
Lab, the Metaverse Roadmap aims to be a “living
forecast” recurrently updated by thought
leaders presently transforming and analyzing the
industry.
“The pace of change in metaverse technologies,
such as 3D and geospatial web, educational and
serious gaming, sensors, and the interactive internet
has become so rapid, and the opportunities and
challenges so novel, that there is an unrealized
opportunity for improved strategy through collaborative
foresight in this space,” said Jerry
Paffendorf, research director, ASF.
The Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is apparently the
first public attempt to map the emerging possibility
space of the 3D-enabled Web. Assuming ongoing
industry support after the first map is completed,
the MVR will be updated recurrently to ensure
the evolution of the model.
“Roadmapping is a tested industry foresight
process that uses diverse "Wisdom
of Crowds" inputs from competing and
collaborating experts to discover and map areas
of agreed opportunity, uncertainty, and technological,
economic and social challenges to further development,"
said John Smart, president, ASF.
“The MVR will be accessible, fascinating
and aims to be broadly useful to industry, academia,
analysts, the press and interested members of
the general public.”
Charting major developmental opportunities and
challenges for the metaverse is an intriguing
opportunity for those presently building, studying,
and critiquing the creation of 3D virtual worlds
and their support systems. Corey Bridges,
co-founder and executive producer of The
Multiverse Network, observes that no single
individual or company can to map the evolution
of the metaverse.
“Roadmapping the metaverse is an incredibly
complex and ambitious project, requiring sustained
effort from a large and diverse pool of people,”
Bridges said. “Even then, roadmapping is
not nearly as challenging as building the metaverse
itself. While some of us have already begun creating
actual components of it, an incredible amount
of work remains. To further drive the metaverse’s
evolution, we will need to empower leading thinkers
with the technical ability to translate their
revolutionary ideas into reality.”
Like any complex technological system, Bridges
believes the metaverse will be built organically,
through collaboration and competition, with the
market primarily deciding success and failure
alike.
About the Metaverse Roadmap
The MVR is made possible by generous lead funding
from virtual worlds consulting group, The
Electric Sheep Company, founding sponsorships
from The
Multiverse Network, and the American
Cancer Society, supporting sponsorships from
Sony Computer
Entertainment America and the Arden
Institute, and strategic partnerships with
New York Law School’s State
of Play Conference, the Themis
Group, and the Institute
for the Future.
The project calls for the creation of a concise
aggregated 10-year-vision document for the 3D
web, to be released following the Metaverse Roadmap
Summit to be held at SRI International this May.
Forty-eight distinguished industry innovators,
web pioneers, academics, and analysts will attend
this special event to contribute their unique
perspectives to the dialogue and supporting materials
for the roadmap itself.
For more information please visit www.metaverseroadmap.org
or contact Project Director Jerry Paffendorf
or Project Manager Bridget Agabra
at roadmap@accelerating.org.
METAVERSE
ROADMAP 1.0 COMPLETED; ACCELERATION STUDIES FOUNDATION'S
PROJECT PROVIDES GLIMPSE INTO TEN- AND TWENTY-YEAR
FUTURE OF THE 3D AND VIRTUAL WEB
Mountain View, Calif. August 17, 2007
– The Acceleration Studies Foundation, a
nonprofit organization engaged in technology foresight
projects, today announced the free online availability
of its inaugural Metaverse Roadmap (MVR), a forward-looking
public report that explores how the Metaverse
and 3D web are likely to evolve and develop over
the next ten and twenty years.
"The Metaverse Roadmap offers clear and
dispassionate reports on how near- and long-term
technologies will impact virtual worlds, augmented
reality, simulation, and life-logging –
four elements which together make up the Metaverse,”
said Edward Castronova, associate
professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University
and founder of The Synthetic Worlds Initiative.
“This document's cool-headed treatment is
laudable. For even the coolest head, briefly surveying
these developments all at once one can reach only
one conclusion: A new day dawns."
For this project, the foundation set out to define,
document and predict scenarios for the growth
of the Metaverse and 3D Web. Co-authored by futurists
John Smart, Jamais Cascio
and Jerry Paffendorf, and based
on the documented inputs from a Metaverse Roadmap
Summit of 55 virtual world, geospatial, internet,
and futures experts which convened May 2006 at
SRI International, the MVR employs a simple model
to illustrate key ways this rapidly emerging medium
is extending its reach into the physical world
and morphing to contain our personal, social and
imaginary lives.
"No one can centrally plan progress in a
new medium like virtual worlds, but thanks to
a broad analysis like this, anyone can bring their
passion to bear to help forge the future,”
said Corey Bridges, contributing
author of the report and co-founder of The Multiverse
Network, Inc., a virtual world software company.
"The Metaverse Roadmap is a perfectly timed
call to action for the virtual worlds industry.
Yes, it predicts, but more importantly it challenges
grizzled veterans and enthusiastic neophytes alike,
setting goals for those of us actually building
worlds and associated technology.”
Janna Anderson of Pew Internet
& American Life's Imagining the Internet project
participated in the study and believes the MVR
frames many key issues tied to communications
evolution and humans' extension into a blend of
Alternate Reality, Virtual Reality and Real Life.
“It builds an awareness of what we might
expect in the future due to the implementation
of the GeoWeb, virtual and mirror worlds, life-logging,
and so forth in our information-saturated lives,”
Anderson said.
The Metaverse Roadmap
The MVR's findings are outlined in two documents.
The first, MVR Inputs (75 pages), summarizes key
insights in 19 foresight categories collected
from the MVR Summit, and the second, MVR Overview
(23 pages), synthesizes some of the Inputs into
a series of narratives to explain important features
of the change and opportunity ahead.
The yearlong analysis was sponsored by a small
group of thought leaders inside and outside the
IT community who are committed to public technology
foresight. Neary $100,000 of donation and foundation
money was raised for the work.
A goal of the MVR Project is to regularly update
its ten- and twenty-year sponsored public foresight
in this critically important space by periodically
seeking the guidance of experts at sponsored MVR
summits, and engaging in extended interaction
with online communities through the use of blogs,
wikis, podcasts, and other media. For more information,
please visit: www.metaverseroadmap.org
The Acceleration Studies Foundation
The Acceleration Studies Foundation is an educational
501(c)(3) nonprofit engaged in outreach, education,
research, and selective advocacy with respect
to issues of accelerating change. The organization’s
aim is to help individuals, business, and government
discover and intelligently choose a future of
“exponential promise,” greater opportunities
and benefits enabled by exponential growth in
knowledge and technology. The ASF attempts to
do this by educating clients and the wider public
on near and longer-term technological futures
and the mechanisms and meaning of accelerating
rates of technological, economic, and social change.
For more information, please visit: www.accelerating.org
Members of the press, please contact:
Bridget Agabra
Project Manager, Metaverse Roadmap Project
Roadmap(at)accelerating.org
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