News.com has a great account of the Metaverse Summit, which was about how video game design, geospatial engineering, high-tech research, software development, social networking, telecommunications would reshape the virtual world (or the overlap between the physical and the real world). The outcome they highlight is that "agreement about the metaverse of 2016 was hard to find", which is of course interesting to me. Here are some trends they discuss:

"I thought we were going to focus a bit more on virtual worlds because when I hear the term metaverse, I hear 3D virtual worlds. And we ended up talking about virtual worlds as well as augmented reality, which to me is kind of separate technology in its vision," Moore said [PARC] (...) One of the questions asked most frequently throughout the event was whether an overriding metaverse of 2016 will be commercially owned or open source. There was little agreement about that, but it was clear that the companies seen as most likely to provide the tools for a single metaverse upon which many 3D, social applications could be built are Microsoft and Google.

In part, Google was seen as more likely because of its development of Google Earth and its recent purchase of the maker of the 3D modeling software, Sketchup. (...) In addition, there was a general consensus that--as mobile devices become more sophisticated--the 3D Web would become much more the province of such devices and far less of the kinds of desktop or laptop computers we know today.

A public document that would wrap up this will be published by the end of the summer. Why do I blog this? I am interested (from my research perspective) about how technology reshape spatial practices.