Someone is going to make a lot of $$ here (or: why haven't MMOVSG taken off?)

If you ask yourself what are the real basic needs or killerapps that people will probably spend money on endlessly no matter what, you will probably narrow it down to something like : gambling, sex, sports, shopping (on a slightly different note - my good friend Gil once quoted his father's saying allegedly a relic of the communist era- "there are three things people can look at tirelessly: flowing water, dancing flames... and someone else working ;)

I have been troubled for quite some time with the question of the seemingly underserved market for online-virtual-multiuser-sex/porn (MMOVSG - Massively Multiuser Online Virtual Sex Games). With the massive popularity of "2D porn", the emergence of VW and MMO's and the ever increasing sensitization thresholds one would imagine that this would take off????

Yeah - there are some beginnings like RedLightCenter a lot of talk about sex in SL center (see this for some funny updates) but by and large there has yet to surface any major adult industry player and move in on this market. A good MMOVSG site (is that an oxymoron?) to see the current state of the industry would be this place.

so here are some thoughts:

• Geography 1 - this will happen in Japan - no doubt! Why - first they are really into technology, gadgets and all that, they are way up there on the social networking thing and because of cultural idiosyncrasies porn is absolutely mainstream there (when I was working there i was initially shocked to see serious adult business men in the subway in rush hour browsing through kiddie anime porn - and i mean this in the best of ways;)




• Geography 2 - Japan - obviously 3D visualization technology is not up to par with real live video. In the Japanese market there is already a great abundance of adult anime (called Hentai or Adult Manga) so they are already used to consume non-realistic forms of adult entertainment. I read somewhere that the Hentai adult market is 200Billion Yen (~1.8B$). I think that was a 2006 number.




• First wave?: although some MMOVSG's are already out there it is reasonable to assume that the first wave of mass adoption would be in single user applications that will mimic the conventional adult entertainment experience. As always web killerapps seem to be based on taking something that is already working great and just transforming it into a new venue/level and not changing the rules of the game totally. That being said - the ability to customize the experience and share it with others is probably a really strong incentive that, over time and with market education will drive users here.




• I/O devices...!: I have been saying for a while that the whole VR thing is highly dependant on input and output devices that will enhance the experience and transform it from a cool game into highly believable experience. Nowhere is this true as here - obviously the sexual experience is something that derives from visceral emotions/senses and not from enlightened thought so the more sensory inputs you've got working for you the better. Some people have decided to bud this field of adult remote sensory stimulation "TeleDildonics" (fancy that on your business card). I would start just by taking a look at Kyle Machulis' site slashdong



• I/O 2: beyond the "specialized" devices that i mention above, obviously stuff like 3D cameras and VR goggles with HD quality will probably be a big boost to the space of VR and of course to this area as well (I know of a few companies that allegedly work on the 3D one of which is my friend's Eldar MantisVision...)



• Pornnovation - A great place to look at if you are thinking seriously about this field is Arse Elektronika - THE conference about innovation dealing with digital media, robotics, the web and adult entertainment.



• A perfect fake - this is an amazing (really) and disturbing 60 min documentary directed by Marc de Guerre about the myth of the search for the perfect human drone/fake. Of course it focuses on the female figure and touches on adult entertainment but also airs some interesting views from academia and such - really a must see!

Some last thoughts on a slightly different note:

I have long held the opinion that loud music, violent movies and porn are great avenues for venting violent thoughts and have lobbied for opening up the Internet connections of our neighboring countries to stuff like that with the thought that if you are watching BayWatch you will not go to war. Some time ago my good friend (and serious economist and novo Zionist) Yoav found some interesting corroborating evidence for that...see here in his blog ;)



MC

VR, vision and sense of self

A couple of days ago I received a post from a team mate (its in Hebrew so I wo'nt bother with it). It basically talks about two separate experiments that were carried out in Europe and deal with recreating rigorously "out of body" experiences for tested subjects by using sensory inputs from video cameras to their eyes in which they see themselves. These were both part of the latest Science issue but the two originals can be found at the UCL Neurology institute and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane. ostensibly what both researchers demonstrated was that projecting people with images of themselves from the back in real time, while conflicting physical sensory inputs (touch) to their bodies, created a perception of being outside ones own body.
As an anecdotal side note - about 10 years ago while at a government research facility and dealing with stereo vision I had pondered seriously on the implications of manipulating the points of view of our eyes and what effect that might have on our perception. My concept was somewhat different and basically talked about using the same video camera feed but with one "eye" set to normal and the other changing perspectives. I hypothesized that as long as the two images were towards the front of the subject (such that when she moves to her "real" front both eyes get closer to the far wall) she will retain her sense of balance and self. I expected that once this relation was broken (say one camera was 90 degrees to the other, or pointed backwards) our consciousness would break down and our sense of self localization could suffer. Unfortunately this was not part of the agenda at the time and I never returned to it. I wonder if some of the neuroscientists looking into this field could take on this experiment...
At any rate out of body experiences connect directly to the issue of self and the connection of our physical and mental existence as a unified pair. This has been something revisited by many philosophers theologists, cognitive scientists and even physicists over the years and seems to be a critical hub of both social science, brain and neurology, physics and artificial intelligence and a hotly debated issue these days.

MC

Vertical model of VW?

So I'd like to share some thoughts about how I imagine the vertical of VW might evolve from its current fragmented form. Right now it seems that most VW (I am talking about "free from" VW and not WoW style) have adapted the following structure:

• Endusers – like in everyday life people consume services and goods in the form of entertainment, education, shopping, leisure etc. They also interact socially.


• Infrastructure and service providers – these could be stores, data centers, media outlets, financial services, project integrators (like ESC), marketers (like Centric ) retailers etc. Out of these some are extensions of larger RW brands and some are local "in world".


• World "owners" – these are the entities making the rules and deciding upon the theme, content and so on. At this point in time they are key players that drive the industry forward with new ideas and concepts.


• Platforms - providers of the basic engines behind the experience (like Forterra, SL, BigWorld and so on)

Obviously some of the current VW have a few of these functions merged (i.e. – SL is both platform and world owner and as such didn’t need someone to build their world at day one). As this is an emerging vertical there is still very little clarity as to where it might go. This will also depend on VW going towards Metaverse style models that are all inclusive environments or limited functionality theme specific outlets (like MTV Virtual Laguna Beach).

After several talks to people in the industry my current thoughts are somewhere along these lines:

• Platforms are the most challenging technically and suffer the most form lack of interoperability. They take a long time to develop, witching costs are high and are investment intensive. For these reasons I foresee this as one of the places more likely to see the big names (Google, MS) so future consolidation and/or standardization is a probable outcome. With that in mind it is safe to assume that better tools for rapid deployment will lower the technical barriers to creating VW in the future.


• Service and infrastructure - right now this is a really segmented area, with some businesses just small time and others large brands. This sector could split up into two where the bottom is basic infrastructure (financial, V real estate, security, IT and so on) and on top of it a myriad of retail or consumer businesses. At the end of the day if these worlds are going to scale up most of the basic service providers need to consolidate and be big names that can support large scale operations. Moreover, leveraging their RW brand trust (say like banks or insurance) will make it easier to attract heavy clients in VW as well.


• Integrators - integrators and world builders today thrive on the fact that platforms are not easy to use and thus this function is critical for players who are not technology companies (MTV, BBC, WalMart). They make much less sense in a world where big players offer wide range services, interoperability is better and platforms are more ubiquitous. Current vertical players (like ESC or Chung) will either consolidate or shrink.
  
• World owners - right now they are the driving force (have the crazy ideas) in a wider perspective there is a very strong survivability bias - some will be big and others disappear or remain niche players. Here again big names might come up.
  

In moving from niche to global mass market VW will need to adapt their verticals to be coherent within the larger scheme of things and within RW sensibility.

MC

3D I/O as VW enabler

For the past couple of months I have been pondering the issue of VW mainstream penetration as a 3D extension or hull of the WWW.

In the recent VW2007 in NYC, IBM rep was talking extensively about the 3Dnet - what he/they see as the future metaverse like internet.

So beyond the SF connotations what is really the key issue that might drive this development? Personally I feel that I/O devices are THE critical missing link in our 3D experience (of course things like BW, MIPS interop and so on are also not there yet). These devices were basically not even touched upon at VW and in a local gaming conference I attended, and are only lightly touched upon in the blogging community as far as I can see.

The 3D information revolution is mainly based on the premise that our brain processes 3D data faster and more efficiently than 2D as it has honed these skills over many years of evolution(very similar to the way color adds a lot to our image processing abilities such as depth perception, object recognition and so forth). That basically means that the optimal pre-processing of visual information requires that it be rendered in REAL 3D.
The problem is that the current 3D is a mere 2D projection of 3D objects and does not allow our brain to use the information in its fullest (e.g. - two eyes don't really have different perspectives, small head movements do not change the point of view and so on). I argue that when devices allowing REAL3D experience become more wide spread we will be able to harness the power of this revolution. I am talking about devices like haptic gloves and VR goggles and in the future probably brain implants.
The current state of such devices is that they are not there yet as far as price point, performance and usability (some early examples: PureDepth, Icuiti). They will undoubtedly debut in medical/military/research applications or in high end gaming platforms - but as the price/performance mix changes such offerings will become household favorites (just like WiFi, broadband, MP3's and cellphones). A recent article in SciAm featured two extreme high end devices aimed and the radiology field (read $50K a pop!) but it is not far reaching to think that at the rate we are going now we will have such CE devices gaining popular acceptability within the next ten years.

Most skeptics usually point to the fact that text comprehension and searching does not lend itself to 3D....I beg to differ!
Text is not only about reading. Most of what we do with text is search and arrange textual items within various contexts - like lookup something, schedule an appointment, edit a post and so on. To that end it is quite probably that 3D interfaces will drastically change the way we go about these tasks. just look at MSresearch demo to think about what could be next (and there are many others.
The reason that text is such is that it is the only form of information that is formally learned and not hardwired into our brain like say - recognizing faces. Thus text evolved together with the technology that we invented to make it (chisel - feather - fountain pen - ballpen - printing press -writing machine - computer - T9...).One has to wonder what type of text abstraction could be formed when 3D reading and writing is freely available....could we invent a new way to write and read that utilizes 3D?
MC