I realize PaperVision is slightly off the subject for discussions of the metaverse, unable at this time to support multiple AVs, but being able to create 3D environments on the Flash engine adds a lot to the Metaverse toolkit. I’m big on the belief that it’s important not to get too tied to the language of virtual or synthetic worlds, because 3D content will be a parallel, mirror, or immersive adjunct and layer beside, between, on top of and beneath the Internet (and beyond).

The evolving Metaverse will include overlays of virtual informaiton on the real world (HUDs in “RL” cars and information shadows viewed through your sunglasses or on your iPhone), little 3D environments attached to “2D” Web sites, and then worlds within worlds (Croquet being a wonderful example of how we’ll port from one world to the next within worlds).

PaperVision adds to the toolkit and with its Flash-based OS doesn’t require a download for most users, and offers the potential to shuttle information from more immersive spaces. For example, 3D objects in SL that send information up to a server which displays the same information in a little micro Flash PaperVision environment.

There’s a nice PaperVision application that graphs a Twitter stream in 3D…if you imagine this same information was ported into SL and displayed as objects, that those objects had links to in-world avatars, then you can start to imagine how the Web/3D and immersive worlds will start to talk to each other and information will have different froms of expression depending on which platform its expressed in.

Computer Arts put a nice little Papervision tutorial together here.