Craig Mundie, the Microsoft chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft Corp sees their direction as 1st Life and not 2nd Life. However, his vision does include avatars that have conversations with people.
He showed a video demo (see picture) of a "robot receptionist," presumably an example of what Mundie said were more personalized, humanistic applications enabled by developments in computing architectures.
Mundie noted that Microsoft is counting on the creation of a 3D "parallel universe" modeled with tools like Photosynth. However, he dismissed the potential of social virtual worlds that include user-modeled objects. The Photosynth approach may well be as a rearguard action to protect Microsoft’s investments in PCs.
"Many people are familiar with Second Life, which is a synthetic virtual world that people came quite enamored with," Mundie said.
"Our view was that there was a fairly limited audience who was willing to deal with the construction of avatars and operating in that virtual space."
Another location-based visual technology demonstrated by Mundie had a lot in common with the "augmented reality" vision that Ray Kurzweil and other futurists have described.
He showed how a Sony hand-held computer could display live video overlaid with information about shops and other addresses in the field of view.
Mundie predicted that the required processing power for such an application would be available in mobile phones within two years.
