I would like to begin with an analogy as analogies are one of the patterns one uses to get some purchase on the future. And I am going to use this analogy to make two key points.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the economics of the web made it not only a viable alternative to business as usual but a serious threat to business as usual. There are many, many examples. Companies who sent out brochures to customers would spend several dollars per customer. Allowing customers to access the same information on a web sites dropped that marginal cost to pennies. If you sent out catalogs, the savings were even more dramatic. Software distributor could distribute software more cheaply. Customer service became much easier as customer could access the website for information about products. If products required some training, videos could be posted. The economics of the web made it silly to do things the old way.
The second point in this analogy is that when we step back and look at the web from a more abstract level we can see that the web is a large interactive document that made the location of information irrelevant. It used to be that you had to know where to find stuff. And locating information often meant a trip to the library, courthouse, agency or business where the information was located.
Applying the first part of this analogy to virtual worlds we can see enormous economic benefits of using virtual worlds. Several years ago I attended a professional conference in Second Life. I got up that morning, made a cup of coffee, logged in to Second Life and attended the conference. Had I attended the conference for real I would have lost a day traveling to the conference and a day traveling back. Further, if there were dead spots in the conference during which no papers were being presented that I cared about, my time was dead as well. At home, I could just go about my regular business if there were lulls. In addition, to my time there were other expenses. I would have had to pay for airport parking, airfare, ground transportation to and from the hotel, room rental fees, and meals. This could easily add up to thousands of dollar whereas the virtual conference cost me next to nothing. This is one example where the economies of virtual worlds parallel the economies of web technologies.
But, this example is far from the only one. One can use virtual worlds for meetings, tourism, and education with similar economies. I will elaborate on the tourism example. Let's say I wanted to spend a week vacationing in Ireland. Using the old approach, I would fly to Ireland, spend two or three days learning how to get around, two or three days enjoying the country, then a day or two winding down. Once I arrived back home I may realize where I would have liked to have gone but didn't. And I might remember something I decided not to buy but now wish that I did.
Let's look at the same vacation with the benefit of virtual tourism. First, I might visit virtual Ireland several times during the weeks or months leading up to the trip. I am doing this at my leisure and from the comfort of my home. But, during that time I become more acquainted with country an what I want to do there. Then I take the real trip. Since I have already familiarized myself with the country before arriving, I don't have a period of adjustment and I don't make the wrong decisions about what to do. Then when I return home and realized I should have bought those Irish linen sheet, I can just go back into virtual Ireland, find the store and order the sheets. Further there are other places that I might want to see virtually but not actually travel to. So, the virtual world offers touring options that don't even exist today.
On the second point, that of virutalization, I should mention that the web was merely a step in a series of virtualizations where telecommunications technology made the location of things irrelevant. Early steps included such things as coaxial cables which made the location of the computer within a building irrelevant, and on through local area and then wide area networks that made the geographic location of a computer irrelevant. The web and the irrelevance of document location was an important step. And now, with cloud computing, we have make the location of most things irrelevant. Most things, that is, except you. But that is about to change. Virtual worlds will make your location irrelevant. By logging into a virtual world you can be present virtually anywhere. So, not only are computing resources and information virtualized, but you are now virtualized as well.
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