First Person Internet
Just like the zeitgeist has always demanded flying cars, I believe most of us want a first-person internet experience, wherein the internet is laid out as a map to be traversed
This is kind of three or four ideas, really, sort of culminating in a first-person internet experience I think a lot of us are interested in.
Firstly, I’ve got a whole thing about Gameworld first person, which is my concept for like a 3D rendered shopping mall map for gaming related goods and services. Essentially you’d go to the website’s landing page, and part of registering would be to create an avatar, and then you would wander around and there would be like, GameStop storefronts and Kotaku news stands and street-vendor bot avatars selling one-off gaming related goods... like if Nike made an Overwatch shoe, they wouldn’t have a store front at Gameworld (or whatever the name would be) but they’d want to offer that specific item. So there would be some Nike avatar hawking gamer shoes on the street and if you walked your avatar over to the GameStop door and opened it, it would open their website on your computer, but eventually, GameStop would invest in a 3d rendered store, especially if there were things like rotating themes so, maybe this week everything in Gameworld is skinned in western themed stuff, and the GameStop has saloon-style batwing doors and hardwood floors. People’s avatars are showing off their special edition gunslinger skins or whatever.
Secondly, I have an idea I’m calling E-state, which is basically just “what if your computer, instead of being visualized as a two dimensional desktop, was rendered as a 3D space, and your icons were rendered as 3D objects”... so to open your calculator app you walk your avatar over and pick up the calculator, or to open a document you select the leather-bound image of it from the bookshelf. And “what if people could visit your computer in this space?” Like, what if every personal computer came with a 3D rendered public space (website associated to that specific computer) and 3D rendered private space (desktop) and you could invite someone’s avatar from one to the other?
Thirdly (still on the creation of a specific first-person internet experience I’m looking for) I have this idea about Google Maps being co-opted as the real world’s online body... and this could happen either through virtual tourism, or through another game, Google Zombie, which I think would lead directly to first person internet if created. The core concept is you take like, three or five slices of zoom from google earth (so, you take everything at street view you could call “on foot” everything at like, an over the shoulder height you could call “vehicle”, a zoom level of ten meters above the ground and call it “flying”, and then a way zoomed out slice for “map”) You ditch everything else to make it easier to render, then you skin it and code it to be pretty and smoothly navigable, you give it physics. Essentially making it so you can walk and jump around googlemaps street view as smoothly and easily as controlling an FPS. You have a bunch of wallpapers and furniture and items and stuff that you tag like “office” or “kitchen” or “store” and when you walk into a building designated “office” a program randomly generates a blueprint and puts a bunch of office-tagged things, desks and some fluorescent lights and a couple water coolers or whatever. So like, if you want a crowbar, check hardware stores. Then you fill the streets with zombie AI and everyone can get together with their friends and play out their very own “what if the zombies came to my hometown” scenario.
Looking at the Dominos / W.O.W. relationship, it’s easy to see how hardware stores would want you to actually be able to buy a real crowbar there if you wanted, like, they could put a vending machine in each google zombie ACE hardware location and clicking on the vending machine would open the ACE hardware website. Safeway too. You could run your real life errands while fighting zombies with your friends “Hey Laura, take this rifle and cover me, I gotta run into petsmart and order some dog food” Lots of businesses would want in. Imagine your friends all doing a last-stand-at-the-mall-plus-christmas-shopping mission. Think of the promotional events.
Of course, people would request a no-zombie version. A zombie opt-out.
So you could just log onto first-person internet and it would be just like playing a video game, if the video game was actually google maps and the whole internet/real world was accessible through it. Like, you could swing by the first-person Cal Tech campus online, and get a virtual tour or sign up for classes, or pay for a parking pass. Or from your living room in San Diego you could be wandering around Virtual New York and you see a Peet’s Coffee and you go in and order a mocha - the baristabot tells you it will be 35 minutes, you pay, and a Peet’s in San Diego makes a to-go mocha and sends it to you via some delivery app. While you wait, you walk out of the virtual Peet’s and fly to Boston real quick to check out a local skateboarding store your internet search turned up - they’re offering a discount for first-person shoppers because the same company that pays to have their logo on some skateboards irl now has their logo on every single cosmetic skateboard in the virtual shop and they sponsor the online store based on unique visitors. You get creative with the allowances so it’s cooler than walking around running errands irl because you can look like silver-surfer and have a lightsaber in your items menu, and opt in or out for things like “sewer-beasts” or “muggers” or “super heroes and villains”. I could go on for days, but, viola, the first person internet.
I’ve got a whole thing about virtual tourism too, but it’s not quite as flashy. Museum tours and city tours and drone tours and all kinds of stuff. First person internet could have its own currency. There’s a whole bunch of career paths, working entirely in first person internet. A whole new way of doing nature preserves and schools and corporate companies and zoos, also. Lots of things. Anyway, still figuring out where to go from here on this idea.