The Coming Virtual Web

In the future, the Internet is almost certain to look more realistic, interactive, and social—a lot like a virtual world

by Robert D. Hof

Ever since Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash in 1992, the virtual world he described in his seminal dystopian novel has been the Holy Grail for a generation of tech whizzes. The metaverse, as Stephenson called it, was essentially the Internet.

But in place of the flat, two-dimensional World Wide Web that had just been invented, he imagined a completely immersive and highly social 3D online world. People's avatars, or virtual representations of themselves, could interact using facial expressions and body language so richly textured that for many the metaverse became more compelling than the real world.

Now, 15 years later, the glimmers of a real metaverse are coming into focus. You can see it in the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft, which is revolutionizing online games with sophisticated graphics and complex team strategy.

Virtual worlds such as There, Entropia Universe, and Second Life let you create avatars, buildings, and even virtual classrooms and businesses. With Google Earth and Microsoft's (MSFT) Virtual Earth 3-D, you can transcend the map layout and zoom into satellite-mapped locations around the world.

All these developments have one thing in common: They suggest that before long, the Internet of the future, and the vast wealth of information and services on it, will look different: slicker, more realistic, more interactive and social than anything we experience today through the Web browser. "Three-dimensional virtual worlds will, in the near future, be pervasive interfaces for the Internet," says Bob Moore, a sociologist who studies virtual worlds at Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, the legendary Xerox (XRX) lab in Silicon Valley.

Trappings of a Bigger Change

This Internet of the future won't just look different. It will work differently, too.

In a sense, it could become not just a portal into various media, entertainment, and communications services but a window into a much richer virtual life. It may become the place where we engage not only in familiar real-world activities such as family reunions and shopping trips with friends but also new, only-in-cyberspace adventures such as online games and virtual economies.

For all the visual appeal of avatars and slick 3D graphics, they could prove to be mere trappings of a bigger change in how people use the Internet—one only hinted at by the current crush of so-called Web 2.0 companies. Above all, virtual worlds hold the potential to transform social interaction online: In contrast to the Web, where there's almost no assumption of a human heartbeat behind the Web page, virtual worlds are inherently social settings. "You go up to an avatar and you know there's a real person on the other end," says Joe Miller, vice-president for platform and technology development at Second Life creator Linden Lab.

That's why the growing appeal of virtual worlds may prove to be much more than the fad some folks think it is. Social interaction, after all, is the key driver of people's use of the Internet today. From social networking sites such as Facebook and News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace to participatory projects such as Wikipedia to sharing services like Google's (GOOG) YouTube video site—not to mention such old standbys as e-mail and instant messaging—social activity dominates what people want to do online.

Defining the 3D Internet

And it's clear that Internet users crave richer ways to interact. "This is the mode of communication that we're gravitating toward," says Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer at Sun Microsystems (SUNW), which offers a computing platform for running online games and virtual worlds. "It's really going to change how we communicate and view information."

Eventually, at least. World of Warcraft and Second Life may be all the rage now, but they still touch relatively few people's lives, in no small part because they're primitive and awkward to use.