Metaverse Future vs Past Experience
Written on February 17, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
Following a panel discussion that included Cory Ondrejka at the Stanford Metaverse U conference today, I was looking at his blog. Something he said in an entry called Henrik’s Questions made me think about where I was in 1988, with regard to technical developments since then.
At that time, I was working for Boeing on the Space Station design program. At the end of that year I had just finished writing a section of a contract document called the “Design Knowledge Capture Plan” in which I said we ought to be using hypertext documents preserved and distributed on optical discs (i.e., CD-Recordable, which had just been announced but was not yet available outside of the lab). The contract reviewing committee at NASA pooh-pooh’d the idea, saying, “That won’t be real in the lifetime of our 10-year project.”
Less than three years later, I had burned a hypertext CD-R on my desktop. NASA’s International Space Station still isn’t finished 20 years later.
The point of this story is that predictions in the technical arena are very risky, and ultimately meaningless. The reality is almost always either much worse or much better than people think it will be.
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