Mashing Up My First and Second Lives

My good friend Chuck Hamilton at IBM is part of a team championing “serious games” and “serious play” as an emerging global business opportunity.  The driving vision is that a major part of the world’s economy may be transacted within virtual environments like SecondLife within a generation.  In retail, for example, the text-heavy flatness of online shopping will be replaced with bustling, shopper-intensive, clerk-attentive, and product-rich 3D experiences.  I’m sure many of these dreams will come to virtuality, but I’m much more interested in how they will come to reality – how our first and second lives will blend productively using mobile media.

One of the biggest current challenges for mobile media is hyperlinking the real world.  Where and how do you manage the equivalent of URLs as I’m walking down the street so that they’re abundant, ready and easily accessible when I need them, yet not overwhelming and completely obnoxious when I don’t?  The real world is already flush with signs, advertisements and graffiti marketing to our attention economies, so there’s simply be no room or tolerance for the blizzard of potential stickers, codes and other eye-candy that might hope to win our attention to mobile media opportunities.  The Mobile MUSE Metrocode Project has good experience here – urban environments are already highly competitive and tightly controlled attention marketplaces. 

An obvious resolution might be with handheld NavTeq or GPS-synced Google Maps solutions that overlay the hidden affordances of the real world onto your mobile experience.  This is already being done in cars and for a number of mobile phone applications.  The advantage here is that such affordances can be tuned to your interests and hopefully filtered effectively for unwanted spam of all kinds.  It will work.  And work well.  But it’s still flat.

Enter the First-Second-Lives-Mashup.  Imagine walking down the street with the equivalent of a SecondLife version of your city tracking your every step.  The handheld landscape is enriched with opportunities you care about.  People you care about join you at your will, walking down a virtual version of the street beside you while their experience is augmented with elements of your presence and reality.  You can equally teleport into elements of their mobile realities.  The potential opportunities for extended experience are thrilling.

 Yes, everyone has heard about Holodeck and Heads-up Display scenarios, but we don’t need to go so science fiction.  One of the features that makes SecondLife work is that it isn’t totally immersive – you are firmly rooted in the real world while your imagination takes the journey.  The uniquely and exciting mashup opportunity is that your body and imagination can finally journey hand in hand.