MMOIE is the new Desktop

3D worlds such as Garry’s Mod and SecondLife have taken some the Hodge bandwidth and electrons over the last 6 weeks or so.  The recent posting from Yoick with their call-out to the general community has lead me to thinking…

The desktop is a metaphor for babyboomers. Going to work, sitting at a desk. Moving files and folders around in a desktoppy sort of way. Manila folders, filing cabinets, printers. How 1950’s is this vision?

I’ve always been pro-desktop as the metaphor for comptuers, and always looked for cool tools that extended the desktop rather than looking at the browser as interface end in and of itself. Dragging from a desktop icon to another to get cool things done (like a file onto the icon of a printer, or file onto a business card) made me giggle with glee.

So, in a rush of caffeine to the brain today, I realised that the MMOIE (massively multi-user online immersive experiences. meh) are may be the replacement for the desktop metaphor. Or maybe the real-world writ large is the new metaphor, expressed in 3D worlds.

Here, I am thinking Snow Crash / True Names / Neuromancer style interfaces not wired into your cells – more what the average consumer sees online

In your 3D world, your flickrs, twitters, blogs, emails, voicemails will appear in a different fashion on semi-transparent screens. With Dashboard,  Sidebar widgets, pop-ups, RSS feeds and the like cramming into my 1280×1024 is starting to overlap too much.

Tech Trader daily talks about the future of Enterprise looking like consumer sites such as MySpace. Maybe in the future our “virtual environment” will be 3D so we can manage the volume of information and interactions we have with customers?

Microsoft has another SecondLife thing going: a blimp!

Ryan Stewart recently blogged about Adobe’s Flex in a 3D world. It’s more than just seeing a 3D graph and rotating it. You really need to have an immersive world. Walk through your data, have information pop up in perspective to the attention it requires.