Next Major Internet Wave

It’s a fascinating to think about the Future of the Internet Web. Internet started as a small thing and now has become ingrained part of our lives. It all started with basic internet web and then organizations realized the possible potential and created portals to increase their reach using World Wide Web. Then came in number of Architectural buzzwords like EAI (Enterprise Application Integration: where organizations wanted their heterogeneous applications to talk with each other), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture: Expose it as a Service Stupid), SAAS (Software as a Service: I want a hosted solution and I am happy-off paying licensing fees).

Social Networking sites (Facebook.com, SecondLife.com) etc marked the beginning of Web 2.0 and web became the lifeline. Buzz words like Cloud Services, Mesh-ups are hitting people’s mind. People want to club all these heterogeneous public networking and other services into one uniform view with integration and interaction among them. Microsoft LiveMesh an example which puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about. (https://www.mesh.com). Web today links a vast system of documents, data, social networks, and applications running on servers all around the world.

Apart from great archirecture, the focus today is on Rich Web applications using Silverlight, WPF, Flash etc etc...

Here is what Forrestor says…

....a leapfrog jump in the Internet's capabilities will culminate during the next five to seven years when a 3-D, interactive, immersive Web emerges to make the Information Workplace — digital work environments that are seamless, contextual, visual, individualized, multimodal, social, and quick to create and modify — even more of a reality.

Investors are already pumping tons of money into virtual worlds, immersive workspaces, and immersive learning simulations — some targeted at business and some at consumers. According to Virtual Worlds Management, a media company tracking the virtual worlds industry, venture capital, technology, and media firms have invested nearly $1.5 billion in virtual world companies in just five quarters from Q4 2006 through Q4 2007. This is one of many indicators that we are in the very early stages of Web3D, which we define as:

The next major wave in the Internet's evolution. Web3D is a system of linked interactive 3-D and 2-D environments that will include everything from use-specific, private applications like immersive learning simulations to virtual worlds open to anyone who wants to join — and people will move among these in a seamless, natural way. Web3D will deliver an interactive, immersive experience that increases motivation and engagement compared with the static, text-oriented or even somewhat interactive graphical interfaces of today's Web. People will be represented visually by avatars that can move in space and communicate with others via voice and text, gestures, user-directed motion, animation sequences, and social networking tools. Web3D will integrate with Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 tools and technologies, as well as business software applications.

Web3D is surely gonna shape the future and way we communicate and interact with the web today. It’s indeed interesting to see google pitching in Virtual Reality space by Google Lively. (https://www.lively.com/html/landing.html)