i was having a discussion with a friend who is an avid/hardcore gamer.I told him to look at coding some MMOG/ (virtual reality) games like secondlife, Habbo hotel, his question was is it really a trend that would pick up in India, Americans and Japanese/Korean/chinese are different and they might like such stuff not sure about Indian.
Virtual reality is something which would appeal to humans across it is not just specific to particular demogrpahics, but as I keep saying they need cultural contextualization. The other day I just happened to surf through some channels & pretty much the same lame regional songs were being aired. It struck me that most of these songs are shot with either the actor/actress dreaming ( They dance around in Switzerland or some other exotic location), now doing that would cost a lot to the movie maker but then why does he do it, he does probably because people demand and when such songs are given they embrace it. Well the point is that everybody loves to live in their own dream world. It is a very deep human need.
I think that virtual reality(Simulcra) matrix style is an eventuality(5-10 years or less), The contextualization of it for different culture/demographics has to be done by undstanding the social cues of that group.
If you are not a gamer then you might like to check out Sims, SecondLife, Hotel Habbo. Peter Ludlows is a big mover MMOG had released the open source Virtual world Metaverse . Another interesting stuff is Solipsis ( combination of Virtual reality community on top of a P2P overlay network)
PS: I am using a Virtual world in a very loose sense here, the indication is just immersion of the person into the game.
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