vBusiness: Virtual Products

After looking at this article, Making the Virtual Real, I thought, hmm...there really is a lot more to the future of virtual economy than just offering customized real world products. The article takes the approach that we'll be using virtual environments to customize products like clothing, mugs, even cars. While this can provide more tools to make that easier for the consumer, I don't think this is going to be the next big thing for what virtual environments will offer us in terms of products. For one, customized products has been around for a while. The internet gave more tools for people to send information for customizing products but it's a speck of what the internet is used for, and a speck of how products are marketed. And the demand of such products is limited.

So where is the real world going to meet the virtual world of products?
We can already see what, I think, is a big product market in SL, the virtual products by themselves. This isn't bad for real life product makers if they can adapt by creating products for the virtual environment. However, it isn't very easy to do right now and some products don't server much value except to be a replica. I think this will grow to some large extremes as technology and demand continues. For example, if you were to combine augmented reality technologies (see videos below) with an operating system and furthered interface technologies (like stereo vision headsets) then you could establish a system in which virtual products can be accessed across many applications and worlds and within real life. Imagine one day, wearing "eye-glasses"(upgraded VR headset) as a way to display virtual objects and applications within the real world. The virtual objects react to the real world (on some level). Also, as display gets better, virtual replicas may prove to be useful to shoppers for some products. But for now, this is a very limited experience and may not prove to be effective until getting over some technical hurdles. Yet, I think virtual products will become more and more like our real life products.

So one can imagine that other people in the same room as you could both see the same virtual objects in the room and control them together. For example: A virtual TV in your house that can be scaled to any size or copied to other areas of your home. It would make virtual design and application closely linked to the real world. That's where SL is trapped. We can't develop extensively with it like we can to make regular desktop applications and products. One day virtual clothing may be something we could almost wear on our real selves. Digital objects, data information could almost be be handed to someone.

So back to the discussion of real world products, I believe there is much more room for the virtual product and application market to grow than the customized real world product market, hands down.

Here's another fun example: