The Origin of Imonology
I started playing computer games at the age of 7, it was love at first sight when I saw the cover of Sierra’s “King’s Quest I”.
A man holding a torch was walking towards a walled dungeon, unknown of what awaited him. The back cover of the game promised meeting strangers, exploring unknown lands, and solving puzzles. The potentials of adventures, quests, explorations…
That was all it took to get a 7-year old hooked to quests and adventures in virtual worlds forever!
Years later when I went to the U.S. and had a very different schedule / life from my counterparts in Taiwan, who were just starting the test-filled cram school-driven life. School was off for me after 14:30, and I would happily buy a bag of chips to go into the worlds of Ultima VII in my laptop.
Ultima VII was a unique game. There were vast lands to explore and many people to meet and converse with. Most amazing of all, everyone in the game world had a schedule: the bakers would get up to have breakfast, before going to the bakery for work, hunters would wander in woods, and king Lord British held his daily meetings with advisers in his castle.
I spent my teenager years mostly in the lands of Ultima’s Britannia and Serpent Isle, learning English vocabularies word by word, by typing them on my electronic dictionary and had it spoken to me so I could learn the pronunciation.
My knowledge and love for the land of Britannia grew, so were my English vocabularies.
In 2003 when I was finally in graduate school and faced with the choice of a research field, game research was the natural choice.
But what? Out of many potential possibilities? There were game engine, 3D rendering, AI, sound effects, etc.
I did a thought experiment that I’ve since explained to many: we all know how much computers have advanced since the 1970’s thanks to Moore’s Law. And Moore’s Law still mostly holds.
If the past three decades we’ve gotten computers from room-size to just a mobile device, yet with even more power. What’s going to happen given another 20, 30 years? That would be an order or magnitude increase in computing, storage, and network bandwidth.
People aren’t going to use those power simply to browse web, watch online films, or send messages. Likely some fundamental applications will appear with tremendous processing power requirements. AI, VR would be the likely use cases.
If VR were to be dominant, then just by wearing a pair of glasses or switching on a wall-size display, we’d be having photo-realistic interactions and conversations with people all over the world!
That would be virtual worlds unlike anything we’ve seen, and likely would impact everything from learning, working, socializing, to playing.
It’d be virtual worlds that host millions to billions of people, while eliminating the need to commute for business purposes. Trips will only be needed for vacations and pleasure, and business trips as we know it would cease to exist.
What I saw was Metaverse described by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, and also recently depicted by Stephan Spielberg’s film adaptation of Ready Player One.
However, while many works likely were still needed to make Metaverse a reality, what was the “one thing” that was still much needed yet still mostly unsolved?
I thought the answer was how to scale up virtual worlds to accommodate millions of billions of people at the same time. Because likely worlds like that won’t just be two or dozens of people interacting.
2004 saw the rise of MMOGs such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, and I joined a number of researchers dreaming about building a scalable Metaverse using Peer-to-Peer techniques.
The birth of Imonology in 2010 was the direct result of the research works that aimed to make Metaverse a reality, and it’s still a work in progress.
