From time to time on this blog, I have covered academic research involving virtual reality in general (here and here) and social VR in particular (here), and it is wonderful to see a new field of research take shape around social virtual reality. One of those researchers is called, aptly enough, the Institute for the Future:
The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is a Palo Alto, California–based not-for-profit think tank. It was established, in 1968, as a spin-off from the RAND Corporation to help organizations plan for the long-term future, a subject known as futures studies. They describe themselves as:
For over 50 years, businesses, governments, and social impact organizations have depended upon IFTF global forecasts, custom research, and foresight training to navigate complex change and develop world-ready strategies. IFTF methodologies and toolsets yield coherent views of transformative possibilities across all sectors that together support a more sustainable future.
IFTF has just released a report on social VR titled Leading-Edge Behaviors from the New World of Social VR:
They describe their study as follows:
On a handful of platforms around the world, a small group of pioneers are hanging out in 3D environments in 3D bodies. They are willing to endure technical challenges, limited content, and lack of standard practices and etiquette to be the first to inhabit and explore new shared virtual worlds. IFTF spent eight months exploring their environments, communities, and practices. Their experiments provide early signals that point to a future where we each have a personal digital body, and content can be experienced in full 3D space. This will have profound implications for how we socialize, learn, work, engage with content, and take care of ourselves.
This study contains 10 Leading-Edge Behaviors: emerging and innovative user practices likely to play out more broadly over the next few years. Leading-edge Behaviors inspire and inform new products, experience and service ideas, and reveal emerging opportunities and implications. Leading-Edge Behaviors are created through a blend of expert interviews, observational and ethnographic research, and horizon scanning with people pushing the edges of new applications, devices, and platforms.
In fact, I was interviewed a couple of years ago by Lyn Jeffery, a cultural anthropologist who works for IFTF, about my own experiences in social VR (which I believe predates the research in this new report).
I was very surprised and pleased to see my own definition of social VR appearing in this report! (Hey ma, I’m famous!)
Here are the 10 leading-edge behaviours in social VR identified in this report:
This is report which pulls together insights and information from a wide variety of sources in an attempt to identify future trends, and it is well worth your time to read through it in detail. If you are interested in this report, you can find it here (the link is a Adobe Acrobat PDF format slide deck). The report includes links to many other resources, making it a good starting point for your own investigations.
I’d like to thank Lyn Jeffery and the entire team at IFTF for releasing this report to the public for free. It’s a truly valuable contribution to the nascent field of research into various aspects of social VR.
