MBI Holodeck

A while ago I read an interesting article at Techcrunch about the future of eCommerce - and this is, you guess it, the sphere of 3D worlds. The main message is that future application will have a strong tendency toward virtual services of all sort.

If this is the case, I may think about the role of our representations in these worlds. Are avatars prepared to do such a new job? In Second Life (which is not the model it will be used in future applications), avatars are capable of many things, but are limited. With SL opening and invitation to third parties to add more functionalities into SL, this may change. To meet these demands, avatars must deal with

• security issues (money transfer)
• identity verification (ID card)
• money exchange (different currencies used in different virtual worlds)
• taxing (Do we tax avatars or the player?)
• geographical re-positioning in different environments
• …

This is a very spectacular phase of the human history, I would say.