The Future of the Internet?

There’s been a lot of these 3-D chat ads lately… especially here on tribe…

When I first got into 3D graphics i went to this conference where Adobe had a booth set up and they were demoing Adobe Atmosphere… kind of a 3-D environment thing for websites… and I thought to myself… “wow this is going to be the future… someday there will be some new 3D code to replace html and xml and flash and all that stuff… and a person’s personal website will be a 3D environment that you can walk through… You can tell people ‘hey come check out this video over at my place… my WEBplace’…” At the time I was thinking there might be big money in learning 3D modelling so that when this new world emerges I could rake in the cash by making custom high-quality avatars for rich nerds….

Now it looks like that might actually be a possible reality here very soon… i rarely click on these ads on tribe, but this one caught my attention… Looks like a combination of myspace and an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game)

I hope this doesn’t come off like I’m helping them advertise… but the whole concept fascinates me to death… I have many many theories about 2012 and the evolving internet is central to nearly all of them…

Video games were the beginning of virtual reality… especially the the new school ones where you can explore… not just be confined to a storyline.

Are we on our way? If so, is our virutal world going to be a mirror image of the world we have now? Is the world we have now a mirror image of a previous world that we destoryed? And where the fuck is Neo when I need him?

1 Comment

• 
  SeventhSwami July 19, 2007 at 7:12 pm

  4 Comments

  Bo
  Thu, July 19, 2007 – 2:26 PM
  I felt sort of like this recently. Kevin’s little sister and her new husband got a Wii, and they made us (well, Kevin went willingly…) play it with them when we went over to visit. As I was trying to bowl (which is hard, when you’re not really holding a bowling ball), I was distracted by the thought that I was possibly only a few steps away from virtual reality. I mean, the Wii knows where it is. It knows distance, height, force… all by a little scanner bar and a plastic remote control. Mount one of those over your whole ceiling, and put some Wiis on your limbs, and you could probably track the body in space fairly accurately. Recreating sensation would be the only hard part. It sort of creeped me out.

  They had this game, I don’t know the name, but it was supposed to be Wario, you know, from Mario Brothers. Except the whole point of the game was to go to these random locales on the map and then perform this series of mini-tasks with the Wii, like “frying things” in a pan by shaking it, “tracing” things in the air, etc., all at increasingly fast rates. There was no plot, no points, and Wario was really only in the intro. I watched them play this one. It reminded me of a whole lot of sci-fi books and movies. The media was entirely random, brightly colored stimulus moving at a faster and faster rate. It didn’t reward strategy, thinking, nothing but fast reaction to unrelated tasks. Again, sorta creeped me out.

  I look forward to VR, really, I do. I just get the cold sweats when I see what people are doing with it, namely nothing interesting. And people still buy it.

  Wow, this turned into a long comment…

  Bo
  Thu, July 19, 2007 – 2:27 PM
  Here’s my real comment: I hope my bangs don’t suck like that when I’m a VR sprite. Side-swept bangs are so 90′s.

  friendly_jen
  Thu, July 19, 2007 – 4:24 PM
  Sometimes
  I think about my mom. How she can’t even use the internet. How she actually talks to her friends in person and sees them in person. How she spends 0% of her energy on the internet. Then I think about my internet habits. And how I communicate with a lot of people over the internet and weather the relationships are better/worse/whatever. Then I think of 3D online universes, and how a kid could meet new friends and never leave their house or socialize with real people.

  Yeah for me technology is like sugar candy. It’s great but terrible in large of quanities.

  phoeniCia
  Thu, July 19, 2007 – 4:34 PM
  to me the future isn’t really here until i can download my consciousness onto the internet…