What's driving this information intensity is an Internet infrastructure that is growing by orders of magnitude more complex, powerful and supple. New devices, sensors and broadband networks are mixing with new software models, architecture and standards to make radically new visions possible.
In this light, many facets of our global society and economy -- energy grids, financial and insurance services, environmental management, healthcare, agriculture and food, transportation and retail - are poised to leap from being very information-rich sectors, to becoming something truly new and different ... intelligent systems, powered by supercomputing, massive storage, billons of users and trillions of objects. Woven together, all these business frontiers represent a new kind of fabric for a new kind of world.
The implications of the smart planet perspective for the 3D, virtual and visual computing future couldn't be more ripe. And they intersect most profoundly in the paraverse, or mirrorworld paradigm, which predicts a deep synchronization and interplay between a smart planet and its digital doppelganger.
Some have called this two-way correspondence or crossroads between the physical and 3D representation the "World Wide Sim," and it does suggest an interface or experience as global, open and large as the Web itself. But such an Earth-scale environment wouldn't merely be a planet-sized 3D world, it would also be the platform for globalizing "augmented reality," or AR, the projection, integration or overlay of digital, 3D information and assets into physical space. (Such as the faux Star Wars-flavored "holograms" used in CNN's election coverage recently)
In this sense, Paraverse and Smarter Planet are interdependent, and mutually reinforcing. The paraverse requires the emergence of an unprecedented information, sensing and processing fabric, and a genuine smart planet would include a 3D model of itself, one that could also feed back in, and inform the physical world via AR.
To date, the biggest obstacle or challenge to the Paraverse model is, of course, its very extraordinary scale and ambition. No single enterprise or entity could ever conceive of building or operating the entire paraverse, any more than one player could own or run the Internet itself. Therefore, it would depend upon massive, long-term collaboration, with no proven business models (short of the Internet itself) on which to justify investment and development in the short run.
But as the smart planet motif reveals, the technological elements, and the economic and societal demands, are in place. So perhaps the virtual facet of smart planet will be a logical, natural and inevitable extension of intelligent industries and systems as they emerge.
The opportunity for IBM, since it has already staked itself to a lead in innovating virtual,3D and visual computing for business, is to align its 3D strategies with smart planet, where it can. Today, the paraverse model is the best fit, with tangible examples in areas such as the Virtual Green Data Center, medical avatars, and the grassroots work across IBM on OpenSim.
This direction may not solve or address any of IBM's immediate or tactical business needs. But it does offer a way to lead in the longer-range, but potentially more dramatically rewarding, front of a smart -- as well as virtual --planet.
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