Visions

There's a currently running "I predict..." [doom and gloom] thread, and I wondered what people's visions of SL in the future are. How do you see SL developing in the future?

My vision of it...

I see it becoming a very real part of the real world, much the same as the Web became a real part of it, with businesses operating on it, bills being paid on it, goods being bought on it, and so on. I see SL (or an environment like it) like that in the future. I see being able to go to a country's embassy and enquire about visas, for instance. I see being able to walk round a supermarket, putting things into a basket, and paying for them to be delivered in rl. I see being able to choose and buy any rl goods. I see it becoming an extension of bricks and mortar.

I don't see the decline of the things that are here now - roleplay, shopping for virtual goods, music, dancing, homes, etc. etc., but I do see it becoming every bit a part of the real world, pretty much like the Web became.

So how do you see it developing?

[added]
I forgot to mention - I also see real world banks operating in SL.

i had thought it might swing the other way, and that LL would reverse the income/outflow of real money.

i like your ideas better. i wonder how long it would take for them to deliver my ice cream.....

I personally prefer to browse the web and shop in a simple 2D browser. It's much quicker.

I see virtual worlds forever being a place to goof around in. Which is fine with me. Although I do question whether all the anonymity is going to be accepted in the future. I sense a shift towards people not being so welcoming towards anonymous folk, and this may grow.

"It's gonna be big. REALLY big".

@ 3Ring - LOL. Hopefully before it melts

I do fancy being able to shop in a supermarket in sl, and have the stuff delivered to my home.

The novelty would soon wear off and you'd just end up going to the virtual PC in your virtual house and shopping from a 2D HTML on a prim website.

I don't think so. I've shopped like that, and I don't find it all that straight forward. You need to know exactly what you're looking for, and I don't. Pictures don't always help, but seeing the things on shelves would help me enormously.

You just want to pick up women whilst molesting the sculpty fruit and veg. I know!

LOL!!!

Worked for this guy...

Damn Glad to meet you.

I'm reminded of the old joke about how, in the future, the cellphones will be really, *really* small.

There will probably always be a place for RL involvement in VR, but as value shifts into virtual economies, more and more RL businesses will become commodities: low profit margins, little investor interest. Probably the fashion industry will be the first to feel the shift, as it becomes commonplace to spend more outfitting a virtual identity than buying real clothing. (Consider: When music performance is more profitable in-world than in RL--inevitable, considering the friction in the RL music marketplace--which wardrobe will be more important to those performers? And their agents? And their groupies?)

Last to go? Medicine. Wine. Perfume.

Or maybe cellphones will just keep shrinking.

I've never been able to buy the idealistic "SL as web 3.0" predictions. I think it will continue to grow and it or something very much like it will become ubiquitous, but more in a having a profile on facebook or myspace kind of way. Not so much in a "I do everything in SL that I used to do on the normal internet" way. There are too many things that will just always be more efficient through a 2D interface. Maybe it's because I was around for all the same kind of hype surrounding VRML wich spawned a thousand clunky irritating inefficient (and ultimately abandoned) 3d web stores and whatnot. "Well, it takes five times longer to do anything, but oooh 3D!!" I just don't see it happening. It will continue to become a larger and larger presence in social networking and online entertainment, but if I want to pay bills, buy books and CD's, research information, or read the newspaper, I'd sooner go to a brick and mortar or buy an actual paper newspaper than try to do those kinds of things in a virtual world.

Where I live we had this thing called "PinkDot'. It was a website you could go to to order your groceries and they would deliver within the hour. It was great! Can't remember how many time they'd get a call from me & friends at 1am when we were out of beer. lol

It only stayed in business for about 2 years in my area. (local grocery stores now offer a similar service)

I see it much as now, used for the same things, only... far prettier and with hundreds of millions online. With a bit more RL connectivity to mobile devices and things like that.

And not really any more reliable. Competition will be great, but... it doesn't cure everything. There are a lot of industries where 'bleah' is par for the course no matter how competitive things are.

We'll have some cultural changes, though, which may be far more interesting. Acceptance of anonymity, alts, things like that.

I pretty much agree with Desmond, though I think we'll be seeing more and more RL functionality in there. How likely am I to go grocery shopping? When I have to I will, with the crowds of idiots with trolleys bashing into each other. Online shopping? Yes when I remember. Inworld online shopping?

Bet I end up not wanting to get out of my virtual bed either. I'm just LAZY though!

Now just suppose, they develop one of the SL clones in such a way that it really takes off and something about it makes it MUCH more attractive for the griefers and trolls and derailers and various other hooligans to operate there instead of here, so they all flock off and irritate the hell out of everybody there....
would we like SL more as a result, or less?
I just can't get the image out of my mind of sitting round complaining that it used to be much more fun.... or is that just stupid?

When the shine goes off then it always does seem like you had more fun. Less responsibility would be how I'd put it, and less people from your past to pop back up again when you don't want it.

What gets me are people who think this is a game. Games have structures, rules, goals, progression, rewards which are pre-defined. By definition, something which is open ended as SL is pretty much a sandbox. What the sandbox gets used for is another matter.

for awhile I had my RL business (a gifts and collectibles website sales business) in SL, and it got nearly no traffic and 0 sales from SL (at least as far as I know, no one said they found it in SL LOL)

so not sure how well the shopping for RL stuff would go over in SL, being ppl want to be annon so much in SL

edited to add that I did have it link up to a website not direct sales in SL, as that is yet a bit too complex for me to deal with.

and once again, with ppl being so afraid of releasing RL info (which you have to do in order to have goods delivered to your home)

maybe someday I will try again, and offer the things for sale for lindens LOL (seriously) rl items purchased with lindens...

I think I'll wait to make any predictions until everyone knows what the fallout will be after the weekends World markets tumbles. I suspect the amount of free cash people have for recreation will have quite an impact on the way SL develops in the future.

Lets face it, if it comes to a point where people have to choose between paying for petrol/mortgage/food or their SL fees......

The SL-type 3D environment is the future of the Internet. I am glad that the technology has improved to a point to make an 3D online environment viable.

I know that it's a bit unstable, but LL seem to be at the forefront of it, them and IBM, and a few others I am sure. Someone always has to try first, sort out the bugs, then when it's running smoothly, the rest jump on the bandwagon!.

A Full-immersion 3D environment is not that far away. However, being TP'ed into the clouds when the server/client has a hitch would probably kill most people in RL!. That has been the debate in Science Fiction circles for years, I even remember reading a book where "holodeck"-type places were run by the underworld, considered a drug, and illegal.

The difference comes in how well a person can separate the Virtual from the Real.

Other B.

My vision of where Sl is going is a bit more mundane, I'm afraid.

At the start it was a geek-fest - a virtual world they could be all geeky in (no offence, geeks!).

Then the RP- and fantasy people started coming in - they realised that they could be what they wanted to be, and do things in the virtual world that they couldn't do in RL. That included the sex-fiends, looking for XXX pleasures in a virtual world.

But recently, it seems like it getting more and more like a souped-up chat room. More and more people coming into SL to just be themselves, look like themselves and act like themselves and just meet people and hang out.

I think that this trend will continue - with more and more focus on linking your avie with your RL person, and less interest in true fantasy exploration. Alts will start to be considered rude, because you are hiding your true self. RPers and those wanting to be different from them selves will become more and more marginalized.

Personally, I think it will get more boring, if that happens. I just hope I am wrong and that the trend doesn't keep going that way.

So there are two of us who think like that It's never been a game. Games have gameplay, and and SL doesn't. It's that simple. I think that those who think of SL as a game are probably used to playing games that look a lot like it, and so they think of it as a game.

Imo, things like supermarkets (U.S. only) could come in and do real world business now, with payment on delivery, although payment in L$ would be perfectly fine, as it's exchangeable for US$. Privacy needn't be an issue either - register with the supermarket elsewhere, so that they have the name and address.

For the sort of future that I envision, it would need a lot more than LL, as LL simply couldn't be big enough. It would need connectivity between a great many such systems, so that large companies could connect their own piece of grid, and smaller setups could pay for a piece of grid on an existing one - just like the Web is.

I generally agree with that. It doess seem that the business plan for SL is to bring it closer to Real Life. It may take awhile, and it may not be a total change , but I do think that the Fantasy/Escapist players will be a vast minority.

I just hope we get 4D web before I die