Hi Tom & Squeakers everywhere...
[Warning: the following is an opinion laden response!]
Perhaps I am only addressing a fraction of what you wrote; I love science fiction, so forgive me if I go a bit off subject. :-)
I really enjoyed the book "Snow Crash" (author: Neal Stephenson), and in particular, the whole concept of a Meta-verse. But, I would argue that we are still too far away from the concept of a replacement reality (virtual). Yes, we could perhaps model some of the 3D features of the Meta-verse with tools like Alice, but it would still be too hard to manipulate that universe to make it worth the effort.
In the story, the lead character's computer tracks his eyes and fills them with a complete view of his place in the Meta-verse. As he moves about his room, his avatar (his virtual simulacrum) moves as he does. In order to create this kind of simulation, we would need some pretty fancy hardware that doesn't exist yet! I think that a bio-feedback suit would also be essential to navigation through a virtual world, as well as a "real" voice interface with your computer. We do have some limited voice synthesis & voice driven software out there, but it is too primitive to be truly practical in the way that it is used in the story.
Also, I'm not sure that a stack of three dimensional representations of BookMorphs would be a particularly useful idea. We have libraries full of actual books in the physical universe, but we have to use card catalogues and computer indexes to find the books. A virtual rendering of a pile of books would be just as messy as a real pile of books.
Don't get me wrong... From a fun & games perspective, I think a Meta-verse would be great! But from a practical, bang for your buck perspective, I'm not sold on the utility of Virtual Reality as a replacement of my office, library, etc.
Now if we could create a voice operated Swiki, that might be an improvement in a useful direction! We would truly have a "chat" room!
---==> Chris
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