I didn’t do too bad on last year’s predictions (read the full post here).
1.) With the exception of mesh imports, not much will change in Second Life. Pretty much nailed this one.
2.) OpenSim will continue to steadily improve, but will also remain relatively quiet. Ditto
3.) Unity will be acquired by Autodesk, and will become the foundation of a whole new wave of ‘realtime’ integration with their existing products. I didn’t get this one, but I’d bet that any insiders on acquisition talks at Unity or Autodesk would agree I was close. I think Unity’s in it for the long haul (measured in months in this industry 😉
4.) The U.S. economy will slowly start to show signs of recovery, but the number of unemployed architects will decrease only slightly. I bet I got this one right, but its a tough one to measure. I’ll count it in the accurate column until someone an prove me otherwise in comments.
5.) A third party, working directly with Google, will develop a powerful new multi-user, virtual world application for Google Earth using WebGL. Didn’t get this one, but I think I was a year too early. I’ll promote this one to my 2012 list.
6.) The popularity of WebGL will grow exponentially, but 2011 will be a tinkering year for it. Disco.
7.) Avatar-less access to virtual worlds will gain traction. Another tough one to measure, but I won’t count this one as accurate because I’d say the avatar-less traction is building more in games, not necessarily ‘virtual worlds’ by definition.
8.) Mobile device access to virtual worlds won’t be as huge as everyone thinks it will be. Yup.
9.) Augmented reality isn’t going to be as huge as everyone thinks it will be. Yeah, and I’d even go so far as to promote this one to the 2012 list too.
10.) A new class of head-mounted displays will FINALLY start to gain some mainstream attraction. It’s about time.
11.) At least one multi-user, virtual world accessed via game console (not Playstation ‘Home’) will start to gain real momentum by the end of 2011. It’s out there, sort of, but but I wouldn’t call it ‘real momentum.’ Definitely not virtual worlds by pure definition.
