IBM Building Metaverse
December 21st, 2007I like the Snow Crash world more than the tech. Stephenson got it right: grim burbclaves, corporate statelets, private armies, and toxic, polluted urban wastelands. Is it sci-fi or is it just outside your window?
This Wikipedia description of the Snow Crash setting is pretty good:
The story takes place in Los Angeles, in the area formerly known as the United States, during the early 21st century. In this hypothetical future reality, the United States Federal Government has ceded most of its power to private organizations and entrepreneurs. Franchising, individual sovereignty and automobiles reign supreme (along with drug trafficking, violent crime, and traffic congestion). Mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts, and private security guards preserve the peace in gated, sovereign housing developments. Highway companies compete to attract drivers to their roads rather than the competitors’, and all mail deliveries are done by hired couriers. The remnants of the government maintain authority only in isolated compounds, where it transacts business that is by and large irrelevant to the booming, dynamic society around it.
Much of the territory ceded by the government has been carved up into a huge number of sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong”) or the various residential burbclaves (suburb enclaves). This arrangement bears a similarity to anarcho-capitalism, a theme Stephenson carries over to his next novel The Diamond Age. Hyperinflation has devalued the dollar to the extent that trillion dollar bills, Ed Meeses, are little regarded and the quadrillion dollar note, a Gipper, is the standard ‘small’ bill. For physical transactions, people resort to alternative, non-hyperinflated currencies like yen or “Kongbucks” (the official currency of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong).
I wonder if IBM will add a Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates to their ‘verse…
And who gets to carry the swords?
Via: Network World:
IBM is building a virtual world to help its employees collaborate, and while it’s not the first big technology company to do so, Big Blue may be unusual in that it decided not to mess with those silly laws of physics in its own virtual environment.
“Why do we need walls and ceilings to do a meeting?” asks Michael Ackerbauer of IBM, who is building the company’s virtual world, called the Metaverse. “We’ve had meetings under water and up in the air. Meetings are where you want them to be.”
There have been some mixed reactions to the unconventional model, Ackerbauer admits.
“Some are saying ‘wow, this is great, I’m ready to go.’ Others are scratching their heads,” he says.
Ackerbauer described the Metaverse project this week at Big Blue’s Manhattan offices, where IBM CIO Mark Hennessy was meeting with analysts and journalists to show off a range of technologies IBM uses to help its employees collaborate.
IBM’s two-year-old Metaverse project is in its early stages and it’s not clear just how extensively it will be used throughout the company, which has 372,000 employees worldwide. While a small subset of IBMers do real work in the Metaverse, some of Ackerbauer’s initiatives are simply experiments to see what’s possible.
That’s where the giant boulder comes in. The greenish rock is several times the height of the virtual world’s human inhabitants, who gather around the boulder like office workers chatting by a water cooler.
“You can kick this boulder about 1,400 kilometers,” Ackerbauer says. “We’re just coming up with goofy games on the fly. Let’s see how far we can kick it … what would it be like in zero gravity?”
Something useful will come out of this, Ackerbauer believes. If a few people from different countries gather around the boulder, they’re more likely to work together in the future, he says.
