A Call for 3D3C Identity
Virtual worlds are an emerging medium that is constantly creeping into our lives. Following the success of such gaming worlds as World of Warcraft, The Sims and others, terms like 3D, avatars, chat and real money are rising. For individuals, new forms of interactive entertainment, mostly social, are also pushing virtual worlds. For the enterprise, the drive to save travel costs and the need to gain new customers and retain current ones push this trend even further (Murugensan, 2008).
The promise of Identity is simpler: better, safer, adaptable, and cheaper services for customers and users, as well as for suppliers and manufacturers. I want to share my own excitement over the societal value of well-governed identity.
I maintain that Real Virtual Worlds will, eventually, offer a paradigm shift. What we see now with Second Life, World of Warcraft, Club Penguin and more then 100 other worlds, is just the beginning. In comparison to the Internet age, we are at the “Gopher” stage (Gopher was a pre-browser method to view hyperlinked data).
This budding arena of Real Virtual Worlds has its roots in two fields: Virtual Reality (Burda & Coiffet, 2003) including Augmented Reality (Bimber & Raskar, 2005) and Gaming worlds (Bartle, 2004; Alexander, 2003; Alexander, 2005; Taylor, 2006),,,. Other related fields, also affecting virtual worlds, range from economy (for example, of virtual goods), sociology (nature of communities) and law (copyrights and ownership), to biology (new brain based human-computer interfaces), computer science (performance, reliability and scalability) and mathematics (algorithms for 3D rendering and animation).
I use the adjective “real” to distinguish between virtual worlds and gaming worlds. “Real” implies a potential reaching further than imagined today. While today’s virtual worlds are clearly used mostly for fun and games – Real Virtual Worlds have the capacity to alter our lives. (Note: for the sake of brevity, I will use Virtual Worlds or simply Worlds).
In the following section, I will briefly present 3D3C virtual worlds as a necessarily needed background. Then, using concrete examples, I shall share some of the challenges that call for a systemic approach to 3D3C Identity. My goal is to expose and highlight some of the challenges for 3D3C Identity and, hopefully to drive people to action. I do not claim to present a complete or even a balanced approach to 3D3C Identity. However, I do claim – emphatically – that we need to think about identity and build it into the next set of virtual worlds standards. Future virtual worlds, when they arrive, and current real worlds that are based on current Internet and IT technologies, will benefit from such a systemic approach to identity.