There are so many communications companies pushing products and services revolving around virtual worlds, one wonders if we are about to see a new subset of communications break out and achieve mass appeal like VoIP, the iPhone or Blackberry. Do you think we could see a time when we all have avatars — or even multiple avatars used when communicating with different people?<\/p>\n
Think about it… A work avatar in a suit, a casually dressed avatar for hanging out with your friends and yet another more "elegantly dressed" avatar for communicating with members of the opposite sex.<\/p>\n
I recently wrote<\/a> that Nortel, Dialogic and NMS are in this space but I forgot to mention that IBM too is deploying<\/a> a virtual world communications system for US intelligence agencies. (Credit goes to Tony Rybczynski<\/a> for reminding me yesterday of this).<\/p>\n Nortel recently espoused<\/a> how we will one day use avatars on our mobile phones and it seems they were right on — at least in theory. You see, Vollee will now provide<\/a> streaming virtual world interactivity to a cell phone near you. NMS, Sonus<\/a> and Dialogic too have pushed the concept but it seems their solutions are more carrier specific.<\/p>\n The Vollee news is truly huge as it shows that we can now take advantage of virtual worlds on the go — regardless of carrier. At first mention, I did have concerns about the speed of mobile virtual worlds as even laptops choke when in Second Life but then again if the processing is done on a host and just the delta of the frames is sent to the devices, the concept has "legs." In fact, this is how the Skyfire <\/a>browser works — it just sends graphics to a device and allows it to render simple bitmaps as opposed to having to deal with complex 3D graphics which would require substantial memory and processing power.<\/p>\n