In the July/August 2007 issue of MIT's Technology Review, a fascinating article by Wade Roush entitled "Second Earth" (please note that access to the article requires registration) explains that "free-flowing and ungoverned" virtual worlds like Second Life, There, Entropia Universe, Moove, Habbo Hotel and Kaneva; and mirror worlds ("if they were books, virtual worlds would be fiction and mirror worlds would be nonfiction") such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth represent the fundamental technologies that will be required to construct the Metaverse .
Roush proposes that, "what is coming is a larger digital environment combining elements of all these technologies-a "3-D Internet"....People will enter this environment using PC-based software similar to the programs that already grant access to Second Life and Google Earth. These "Metaverse browsers" will be to the 3-D Internet what Mosaic and Netscape were to the dot-com revolution-tools that both provide structure (by defining what's possible" and enable infinite experimentation."
"There will be a bunch of different worlds, owned, controlled, and operated by different organizations," predicts David Rolston, CEO of Forterra Systems. "They will be built on different platforms, and you will have community standards about how you can connect these worlds, and open-source software that carries you between them." The word "Metaverse" will refer to both the overarching collection of these worlds and the main port of entry to them, a sort of Grand Cyber Station that links to all other destinations. The central commons itself could be designed as a mirror world or a virtual world or some interleaving of the two: people logging in to the Metaverse might want it to look like Manhattan or the Emerald City of Oz, depending on the task at hand. But either way, partisans say, the full Metaverse will encompass thousands of individual virtual worlds and mirror worlds, each with its own special purpose. To borrow a trope from corporate networking, it will be an "interverse" connecting many local "intraverses."
