Back in October, Daniel Schiappa of Microsoft noted that Microsoft's virtual world play would come within a year - or it wouldn't come at all. And, at last month's Gartner Symposium IPXPO, the company's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie gave a strong indication that the latter is true.
However, that doesn't mean that Microsoft is out of the virtual space at all. As Virtual World News reports, the company is very interested in one particular aspect of virtual worlds: Mirror worlds.
Mirror worlds are an attempt to recreate the real world in virtual space. Imagine the next-generation of Google Maps, which might allow you to wander through a photorealistic virtual London. By contrast, virtual worlds like Second Life take the opposite approach: the only attempts to model reality are created by users themselves.
The level of user interaction with a mirror world is, of necessity, also more limited. While Second Life might allow me to recreate London with the face of Big Ben changed to a bright yellow smiley, a mirror world could only every allow this kind of change as a temporary event. The point of them is that they reflect reality, permanently.
Mundie describes his companies interest in mirror worlds this way:
"Today there's the physical world we all live in, and then there's people experimenting with virtual reality type things like Second Life and other stuff. I personally don't think that that kind of things is going to get huge traction. What I do think is the combination of sophisticated displays and direct manipulation and the ability to have the real world presented in a 3D environment as a navigation metaphor, such a you can move freely between things that you would do if you were in the physical world and doing some of the same things, whether it's going shopping, meeting friends, or whatever. You're doing it within a 3D virtual world, but that world is just a model of the actual world. That's going to be quite interesting. We've looked at moving in this direction. Some of the photosynth technology [a tool that allows users to turn photos into immersive environments] that we've released over the last year and a half, I think is a precursor to allowing everybody to participate in the process of sifting up a representation of different levels of the physical world and then using them as part of the computing paradigm."Ultimately, mirror worlds are the equivalent of the walled gardens which service providers attempted to foist on "their" customers during the early years of the Internet. Mirror worlds attempt to make the virtual experience familiar, which is to try to control the user's experience. Instead of allowing the imagination its full play, mirror worlds force users to use their imaginations in other ways, seeking what amount to virtual temporary autonomous zones within the world. As in reality, anyone wanting an alternative has to learn to live in the cracks between places, rather than within the mainstream. Can user-created virtual worlds and mirror worlds coexist? To a certain degree, yes. However, one thing that the development of the public Internet has taught us is that, given the choice, users will gravitate towards sites which give them the opportunity for deep involvement, rather than a more linear, tied approach. Microsoft missed the boat over user-generated content. Now, it seems, it is likely to miss the boat over virtual worlds, too.
