Round Up of Some Virtual World Year End Predictions

With the recent news of layoffs at Forterra Systems and the closing of Metaplace covered in Not a Good Week for the Virtual Worlds Space, there have been a number of discussions around the topic.

See ProtonMedia’s take at If Forterra Systems and Metaplace have sparked a virtual world industry shakeout, the question is: Who’s next?. In it the president of ProtonMedia, Ron Burns, discusses how ProtonMedia did this year (quite well) and what the industry shake up means from a vendor’s perspective.

Over at ThinkBalm, a firm which tracks and follows 3D virtual worlds for learning, one of the analysts, Erica Driver posted an interesting entry called Forterra Systems layoffs have implications for the enterprise immersive software market. Make sure you read the comments on the blog posting as Robert Gehorsam, the president of Forterra Systems weighs in with some interesting and thought provoking comments.

At Koreen Olbrish’s blog Learning in Tandem an entry titled Virtual Worlds 2.0…A few humble predictions discusses a few predictions including “Virtual worlds will rely less on user-generated content.” She and some others then get into an interesting discussion about 3D virtual world standards and how they exist but few have heard about them. A commenter writes “X3D – ISO standard for interactive 3D, HTML for the 3D web (www.web3d.org) already exists.” Kinda like SCORM…people are vaguely aware of it and care at a minimal level but standards should be invisible to most end users, developers and others. You should read the comments.

Finally, Justin Gibbs created an entry called The end of Virtual Worlds 1.0, now onto 2.0. He makes some interesting points and does point to progression in the field.

All in all some interesting posts about the past, present and future of virtual worlds for learning and collaboration.
__
Catalog of Recommended Books, Games and Gadgets
Recommended Games and Gadgets
Recommended Books
Content Guide