Ran across this while trolling YouTube for latest on the Verse. Not clear whether or not Apple is actually behind it but it certainly confirms that the apple culture resses quite well in the Verse. File this one under Metaverse and Commerce.
March 12, 2007
Into the VerseScape
OK, been a while since I posted. Sorry.
Been thinking a lot about the ‘Verse. I know that SL is the 300 pound gorilla in the room, but certainly not the only game in town and depending on what your business intentions are, there may be other solutions that work better.
This is my first and I am sure meager attempt to catalogue some of the major players across a continuum. Please help me make it better:
Metaverse:
Clearly a SL/There/Big World play where the Virtual Social World has an economic underpinning and the primary value drivers are commerce and collaboration within those contexts.
Intraverse:
Where organizaitons are keen to extend their learning and collaboration technologies into the third dimension. They want to do all the things that their LMS and Collaboration Software can do but extend it into the 3D realm. Centra meets Saba in the 3D world if you will.
Interverse:
Where communities and organizations want to leverage the power of 3D for community and collaboration across firewalls. Not unlike some of the existing collaborative technologies that allow customers to share virtual space with providers. The Interverse is about facilitating 3D interaction between communities and enterprises who have a common goal that requires a higher level of collaboration. Think about New Product Development Prototyping, Chip Layout, Architecture Reviews etc….
So you have the Metaverse, InterVerse and Intraverse. These verses roughly correlate to the value drivers of Commerce, Collaboration and Learning. But as you can see in the picture, these value drivers themselves have overlap value spaces.
Below that I have tried to map SOME of the key players in terms of how they can enable the value drivers. SL is clearly in the Metaverse/Commerce and Intraverse/Collaboration realm with the emphais being on the former. There and Forterra are different packages of the same stuff. One for Metaverse and other for Intra/Interverse. There already has VOIP on board but the difference is you can’t buils stuff like you can in SL. If Peer Procuction (or prosumption) as Tapscott calls it is what you are after, then SL is probably your best bet.
However if you want a platform that runs on 56K, integrates with existing apps, allows you to fire up a browser in world and oh-yeah integrates with your current LMS you may want to check out Protosphere. Metaverse is a new arrival on the scene (for me at least so have not had a chance to grok it) but it seems to fit somewhere in between. And finally for all of us who are educators and have bene salivating over SL meets Moodle (SLOODLE), I’d urge you to take a look at Open Croquet. Some big brains behind this software, most noticably Alan Kay
