Detailed vision of IRL: Reality Fusion

Some people have asked me about the vision behind our company IRL (In Real Life). Although the basic outline is described on our corporate

What is virtual?

From a philosophical point of view virtual is that which is not real, but may display the full qualities of the real. Translations of the real into the virtual are widespread phenomenon’s. The most prominent example of this is the virtual world Second Life which aims at imitating life without the boundaries of reality. Visionaries have made visual representations of what virtual worlds may evolve to in science fiction books, series, movies and art. The Matrix is one of those representations that showed in a dramatic sense what may be the result of artificial intelligence combined with virtual evolution. Of course it is hard to say in what way virtual reality and physical reality will fuse together, but we can start by looking at current developments.

The market

The metaverse roadmap shows the segmentation of solutions that are out there today. To get a better understanding of what you are seeing:

• Lifelogging is blogging, Twittering, Jaiku-ing, Flickr-ing, Youtube-ing and all other applications and websites that provide a platform to share your life with the rest of the world.

• Virtual worlds are digitally created worlds like Second Lifeand game environments . Many companies come to see the benefits of such worlds, because they allow them to try things in virtual worlds before practicing them in real life.

• Augmented reality is basically a combination of the digital and the real.

• Mirror worlds model the real world like Google Maps and Virtual Earth.

Of course this is a simplification. Please read the whole metaverse roadmap to get a better understanding about our vision.

What about IRL?

It is our believe that these solutions will fuse together. Products that want to achieve this should have the right mix of augmentation and simulation while enabling users to be both identity- and world-focused. We came up with our service IRL Connect based on needs we came across and the metavers space model, which will be a geoweb service (see article in The Economist and geoweb on wikipedia) that integrates lifelogging in a social context. From there on we will take our users and guide them to augmented reality. We start with a geoweb service instead of augmented reality or a virtual world for many reason, but the main reason is timing. Although the majority has adopted social networking, mobile devices, Google Maps, direct communication and started creating their own content, they technologically trail behind to initiate the full experience we are aiming for.

We could use your help

I hope the IRL vision is clear now. If you are interested in joining us and help us realize this vision in any way possible, please do contact me through our corporate website www.irlcorporate.com. We are always looking for programmers and people with useful advice that can enhance the user experience for our service IRL Connect. It is scheduled to be released in February 2008.