Indirect Manipulation

I’ve been thinking, which (if you were to ask my wife) never results in anything resembling productivity or value. It’s my blog, however, so you must indulge my risible mental excursions. Even if it means I’m going to become one of those people that Nassim Nicholas Taleb would mock for “taking the quality of their knowledge too seriously.”

A fellow thinker of big ideas wrote something on her blog about the future of the Internet, which is pretty ambitious stuff indeed. She was commenting specifically on ExitReality, a client-side software that transforms any web page into a 3D virtual reality environment. She and I are both participants in Second Life, and we’ve spent a bit of time discussing the virtual world paradigm as it applies to the Web experience.

There are folks who believe that the future of the Internet will expand upon this model, becoming increasingly game-based and driven by interoperability of self-made avatars. Do I think the Web will be primarily a three-dimensional environment conducted through first-person points of view? I’m not sure. It’s certainly the case that Web 2.0 social networks (such as LinkedIn and Twitter) are becoming more identifiable to the “self,” and avatar creation/interchange will certainly drive that model.

On the other hand, it will be interesting to examine how transactional web experiences will evolve with immersive technologies. Even in such a rich environment as Second Life, much of the communication is conducted through messaging windows. Picture a virtual bank, for example. Will a user have the capability to interact with a 3D model of a bank employee, and is that really so different from using any currently available online chat feature? I don’t know.

Also, the importance of microformats cannot be understated. This is on my mind because I’ve been doing a lot of public speaking lately on web accessibility, describing use cases where the translation of multimedia into textual equivalents is considered good and necessary. Consider the W3C’s current development of RDFa. Tagged information sources are increasingly semantic, accessible from any device, and often the presentation layer is secondary to how nimbly the data is received. One could argue that the Web isn’t becoming more visual, but less.

I’ll say this for sure: we are likely witnessing the end of the browser-based website paradigm. Take the time to Google a search term and see how many results come not from the originating site, but from blogs, Digg, Twitter, etc. During a recent interview with Bill Cullifer for the WOW Technology Minute, Google Research Scientist and accessibility advocate T.V. Raman discussed how users will no longer use the “front door lobby” to access a website. According to Raman, people are more likely to arrive at your content by “jump(ing) in through the 15th floor window … or parachut(ing) through the ceiling.” In terms of users acquiring content, our reliance on the home page (and thus the model of website-as-destination) appears to be waning.

Now here’s the thing, and this is what I’ve been thinking about. I’m seeing the Internet as we now know it being split into multiple streams. One will be increasingly text-based, one will be highly immersive, one will be transactional, etc. If these delivery mechanisms can be accessed haptically and driven by the avatar’s point-of-view, then we just might have something there …

Go back to the Indirect Manipulation home page.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 7:24 am and is filed under Social Technology, Technology and Culture, The Pedagogic Vector. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.