A requiem for virtual reality
In...
The legal blog Due Diligence comments on the recent spate of 3D news and commentary:
In a short Wired interview of Neal Stephenson, he reflects on Snow Crash, his first novel that became the ur-myth for the virtual reality investment craze of 1996-8:
For the most part, Snow Crash turned out to be a failed prediction. People have shown limited interest in immersive 3-D technology, so I think it worked better as a novel than as a prognostication. But it provided a reasonable, coherent picture of a particular kind of entertainment technology.
Stick-your-head-in-it VR has turned out to be a niche market, valuable in some applications such as training and modeling. Those who bet on it as a horizontal market, for entertainment, shopping or what have you, all died on the road. Remember VRML, the next big standard? Paragraph, Intervista, and Newfire? Mark Pesce and Tony Parisi? Even the avatar modeling tools have been reduced to gimmicks for selling clothing. A cautionary tale on taking a compelling, coherent yarn as an argument for a real market.
What's actually happening is in many ways more interesting. Rather than substituting a synthetic reality for the actual thing, information is becoming co-extensive with reality. Now it's mobile data and other gadgets, soon it becomes networks of sensors and information tags. Some have tried to gin this up into a ubiquitous 'augmented reality' that will happen Real Soon Now, often with visions of (again) data glasses that will overlay the virtual on the real. Take that with large grains of NaCl. Economic value is not evenly distributed in real space, and ROI will drive deployment. Check out the malls and warehouses first, long before you find sensors hanging on random trees. As for those HUD goggles, see the lesson above. [Due Diligence]
Of course, Tony Parisi stuck with it via Media Machines, kept VRML going and at least generated some revenue, then sold to Many One. Now they're pursuing a 3D world browser. Two other 3D ventures worth following are Linden Lab and their Second Life immersive subscription service, and their pseudo competitor There. (btw, a lot of other 3D news is circulating because of the recent Siggraph show is So.Cal.)
For all that, I think Neal is somewhat right in his own retrospect. With today's limited delivery systems, CG 3D will remain an entertainment-only medium.
12:12:56 PM 
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