Paradigm shift; from the web"site" to an open-source universe

When web browsing was invented in the early 90s, its pioneers had to come up with a paradigm, or a model for how the web would work. Pages had "addresses" and they were found at web "sites," while "links" connected one site to another like strands on a spider's web. Folks like McCrae and Carpenter are at the head of a new paradigm where none of the old metaphors fully work. "How do you traverse links in a VR headset without taking your headset off," Carpenter ponders by way of example. In McCrae's JanusVR, you merely walk through a portal, but there may be other ways as yet unimagined that are better or more universal.

Allan "Aussie" Parker is the proprietor of The VR Bar (now on "about" the 20th iteration) and of JackpotVR. He sees the emerging wave of virtual reality web destinations, together with browsers like Janus, as being akin to the rise of GeoCities and other personal online homepages in the 90s.

Before search engines took off, he notes, "We started out with the original Yahoo landing page, which was just a mass of links." Then before WordPress and Facebook there were places like GeoCities and MySpace, with all their ugly animated gifs and garish color combinations. "We've been through all of these stages," Parker says, "and we're going to go through them again in VR. Except they'll go 10 times faster."

You could argue that part of the paradigm shift has already happened. The web is taking on more and more characteristics of dedicated virtual worlds. "Second Life and World of Warcraft invented the idea of online societies where you shared a lot about yourself," argues Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University who is one of the world's leading researchers on virtual worlds (with several books to his name on the subject). "Facebook took the idea and made a separate environment that does only that, without all the game elements."

Castronova isn't convinced that virtual reality will take over just yet, though.

I suspect that the latest burst of head-mounted gear will have very disappointing uptake and in three years everyone will talk about what a waste it all was

But he notes that digital technology is gradually taking over. "TV has moved online, screens are ever more ubiquitous, [and] we are all getting fatter. Year by year, at the rate of about 2-3 percent per year, technology continues its unstoppable march." As our entertainment and social activity moves further and further into the online realm, our social and entertainment activities are adopting more characteristics of games and virtual worlds. "Longer-run," Castronova suggests, "the attention streams will continue to bleed onto ever-more-easily-accessed channels." As this happens, perhaps we may pivot toward an actualized, real Metaverse — no longer a mostly-virtual realm of science fiction, but rather, one that we really do live in.