Metaverse
From uvvy
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
See also the Metaverse Roadmap
In this site we use the terms "Cyberspace" and "Metaverse" for virtual worlds generated with Virtual reality technologies. "CyberSpace" and "MetaVerse" are almost equivalent (using one or another may depend on whether you prefer Stephenson or Gibson).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Metaverse, a phrase coined by Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel SnowCrash (1992) constitutes Stephenson's vision of how a Virtual reality based Internet might evolve in the near future".
Stephenson's Metaverse is a high definition 3D digital virtual world where users, represented by their avatars can meet and interact just like they do in the physical world. Instead of building websites like in today's Internet, Metaverse developers build fully 3D virtual spaces (scapes) which can closely mimic the physical world, or be as different from the "real world" as the imagination of the developers permits. For example, in the Metaverse you can visit an accurate replica of a real city, a future imaginary space settlement on Mars, a microscale world where you can see individuel molecules and cells, etc.
A few years after writing SnowCrash, Stephenson said that his vision had not emerged in reality. This may have been a premature statement, as in 2006 we can see a growing number of operational implementations, with popular events taking place in a MetaVerse, and an emergent economy consolidating. The most popular Metaverse implementation (2006) is Second Life. The promising new P2P technology Croquet is emerging from research laboratories as a "Metaverse Operating System" and a candidate open standard technology platform for future implementations of virtual worlds.
We believe that the Web of the future, beyond the technologies known today as "Web 2.0", will be a "Web 3.0", or better "Web 3.D", based on P2P online 3D Virtual reality.
On this site we use "Metaverse" (more often than the generic "CyberSpace") for both the concept defined by Stephenson and a specific implementation. The term Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) is used more and more frequently. I still prefer Metaverse because it is not always a game.
