Future of Virtual Worlds

I don’t know. Maybe I’ve fatalistically accepted that technological change rewrites reality so rapidly that it’s increasingly futile to make predictions about technology’s future. So, we encounter a Gartner prediction that by 2011 80% of active internet users will have a “second life” in virtual worlds. Huh? An absolute grasping statement, with no basis. Too much can (and will) happen for this prediction to have any value. Problem is, we’ll start to see this prediction in online forums, conference presentations, and so on…generating blind acceptance. As I’ve whined about previously (and recently saw in a post on ITForum), virtual worlds will gain my interest when they allow me to do something I can’t do anywhere else.