Online Worlds Published

I am pleased to announce a new book from Springer entitled Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual edited by William Sims Bainbridge. The collection of essays is published as part of the Human-Computer Interaction Series. It examines the phenomena of virtual worlds, using a range of theories and methodologies to discover the principles that are making virtual worlds increasingly popular, and which are establishing them as a major sector of human-centered computing (HCI).

Marilyn Lombardi and I wrote the ninth chapter entitled Opening the Metaverse. In it we discuss the need to establish an open metamedium that can support large-scale metaverse deployment. We also describe our research team’s current efforts to design and develop virtual world cyberinfrastructures informed by the successes of the Web and explore how the combination of peer-to-peer communications protocols, open software, and end-user empowerment to freely create and assemble content and functionality can set the conditions for emergence of a global metamedium for collaboration and interaction.