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It is Dec. 31 and I wish to say something about the most important things that happened in the metaverse in 2007, and the most important things that may happen in 2008. Most metaverse blogs have similar posts. For example Virtual Worlds News has the Virtual Worlds Management Industry Forecast 2008, a 36-page report that brings together 45 virtual worlds industry leaders, including CEOs of developers, platforms, and agencies, analysts and thinkers, and lawyers and government representatives to offer their thoughts on and predictions for virtual worlds in 2008. Also examined in the report are the 2008 business goals for many of the leading companies in the industry. New World Notes has an Open Forum: What are Your SL Predictions for 2008? - google “metaverse 2008” for more.

In Second Life, in 2007 there have been two important facts: 1) the open-sourcing of the viewer; and 2) the introduction of real-time VoIP on the grid, and three important trends: 1) companies realizing that their initial campaigns in SL had been poorly planned and executed, with the result that their beautiful and expensive sims were always empty; 2) companies experimenting quietly and without too much press on how to design and execute better campaigns in SL; and 3) the emergence of workable templates for “serious use” of SL for business communication and v-learning. I have written about all these things, see my posts in English and Italian on the blog Transumanar (I have copied the last few entries of 2007 to this new blog dedicated to the metaverse, see the corresponding entries on Transumanar for old comments), and my posts in Spanish on our Tendencias 21 blog.

My company metafuturing S.L. had some prestigious clients for Second Life development and metaverse consulting, and is now established as one of the leading metaverse companies in Spain with clients in other European countries as well. In the last few months of the year Second Life business has slowed down and we actually lost several “done deals” with potential clients due to the bad press mentioned in this article (in Spanish) which has an analysis of the wave of bad press and our comments (see trend 1 above). Fortunately we had also other projects of a different nature (mainly strategic consulting) for other clients, and in 2008 we plan to continue diversifying our offering in order not to depend on SL too much. We have also launched a new company Innovex 4G. However we see that, after the SL media bubble, the business and educational communities are realizing that SL has a real potential for some specific and well-defined applications (trends 2 and 3 above), so we also look forward to new SL business in 2008.

Linden Lab’s Second Life has had the huge merit of making the metaverse available to consumers, and must be considered as a key pioneer (sadly pioneers are easily recognizable from the arrows in their back). The success of Second Life as the first example of commercially viable consumer-oriented metaverse has bootstrapped the metaverse industry, and there are already some interesting alternatives to Second Life. I think the most interesting examples are the open source ones. The OpenSim project is progressing fast, and I think in the second half of 2008 it will approach the maturity of SL server technology. This will open the market of metaverse hosting based on open source SL-like technology, and some service providers are already occupying this niche (see for example Central Grid and watch this blog for our own service announcement). Of course there is also the possibility that Linden Lab may decide to open source its own Second Life server code.

Open Croquet, a very powerful open source technology and one of the most interesting candidate “metaverse operating systems”, is not progressing as fast as it should, but the commercial value added technology and service layer Qwaq Forums begins to show the full potential of Open Croquet for professional virtual worlds (collaboration and groupware oriented VR Intranets and Extranets) and V-learning environments. I think this is a very important trend to watch, and we are offering Open Croquet consulting, development and hosting services.

Another important trend in 2008 will be related to interoperability between different virtual worlds, and between virtual worlds and social networks. Reuters reported that interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which is attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages, and announced that IBM and Linden Lab will work on the interoperability of virtual worlds metaverse platforms. The trend of interoperability between social networks, based on the Facebook platform and Google’s Opensocial, will extend to virtual worlds that will become 3D front-ends of social networks, which in turn will be 2D metaverse back-ends. I have proposed using Facebook as 2D social network back-end for future releases of OpenSim, and there is an interesting example (Second Life Link) of interoperability between Facebook and Second Life. I think the integration with popular, established social networks will greatly increase the potential of VR worlds for business, marketing and educational applications. The possibility of interoperability with Google Earth will be another important issue.

There are of course many other developments and platforms to watch, for example a renaissance of X3D (see also here). Also Entropia Universe and its next version based on Cry Engine 2, new Chinese VR worlds (see also Hipihi), Ogoglio, Scenecaster, Metaplace, Sun’s Wonderland, light web-integrated VR world based on flash-like 3D technologies such as Unity3D, and certainly also some other very exciting and completely unforeseen developments.