I decided to write a think piece on my concept of mobile mirror worlds in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. It should be published in the first half of 2010. The purpose for writing a think piece in this journal is to express my thoughts on a usage of virtual reality technologies for everyday business of life as a natural and legal person. And quantify the data, data structures and data transfer dynamics in a comprehensible mirror world system. While my investigation into this aspect of virtual worlds (metaverse) has been brief and hap hazard for most of the last two years, I thought I would have stumbled upon resources and references that addressed the data dynamics of virtual reality technologies over decades of usage for a given purpose. I say decades because the baseline for my conceptual user is a century!
I'm going to start the thought piece with three data-centric estimates for the 100 years in the 21st century of a middle class US citizen (ignoring gender variation) born without complications after a full-term pregnancy, 01 Oct 2000 and who will die 01 Apr 2099. The century cumulative estimates might be
- Data volume: 10 x 10^12 bytes
- Data structures: 1 x 10^6 files
- Data transactions: 3 x 10^5 transactions
Remember there are 876,000 hrs in 36,500 days or 100 years (ignoring leap seconds, days and years). The task is to breakdown these coarse figures into the story of one's life in terms of supplying, adding value and consuming goods and services from trading (usually currency) for them that have been mirrored in virtual reality. The ownership paradigm used for data retention keeps the data volume manageable from my perspective but the number of links to other data owner's sources will be numerous. So much so I should estimate the number of hyperlinks to data sources an X3D scene graph might have to render contextual information that is not owned by the natural person but useful for interpreting and acting on the goods or services rendered. Let's say
- Data source: 3 x 10^5 hyperlinks
The effect on readers should be instant eagerness to demand royalty-free X3D models of the goods and services they trade and consume from government, corporations and fellow citizens, and a mobile mirror world system that intelligently manages the semantic processing of ontologically compliant scene graphs of those goods and services.
