Virtual Age: Next Wave of Change in Society
The 2009 International Joint Conferences on e-CASE and e-Technology, January 8-10, 2009 Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel, Singapore
Virtual Age: Next Wave of Change in Society a Ali A. Jalali a and Hamid Mahmoodi b Department of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran b School of Engineering, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, USA drjalali@gmail.com, mahmoodi@sfsu.edu ABSTRACT
The Virtual Age is the ultimate progress of information technology and knowledgebased environments into a three-dimensional virtual world. We firmly believe that the enormous expansion of the information age by leaps and bounds along with the availability of the required tools and technologies, will bring about a fourth wave of change in the near future. There have been three waves of change in the history of human progress, namely, the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age. The fourth wave of change or the Virtual Age will create a new era in which most aspects of every day life and world affairs will become virtual. Virtual Age is an umbrella which empowers anywhere, anytime, anyone interactions defying the existing time and space limitations we encounter today. The possibilities are endless, for instance; virtual commerce, virtual banking, virtual learning, virtual government, virtual work office, virtual corporations, and so on. Much higher speed CPU’s, high speed transmission media (larger bandwidths), huge capacities of memory and sophisticated real-time virtual reality software are needed to power us into the Virtual Age. At the present rate of progress, it is projected that hardware and software limitations will be overcome within about two decades allowing the coming of the Virtual Age. Keyword: Virtual Age, Information Technology, Internet, Fourth Wave, Virtual World 1. Introduction Albert Einstein once said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. Significant developments in
Virtual Age: Next Wave of Change in Society a Ali A. Jalali a and Hamid Mahmoodi b Department of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran b School of Engineering, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, USA drjalali@gmail.com, mahmoodi@sfsu.edu ABSTRACT
The Virtual Age is the ultimate progress of information technology and knowledgebased environments into a three-dimensional virtual world. We firmly believe that the enormous expansion of the information age by leaps and bounds along with the availability of the required tools and technologies, will bring about a fourth wave of change in the near future. There have been three waves of change in the history of human progress, namely, the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age. The fourth wave of change or the Virtual Age will create a new era in which most aspects of every day life and world affairs will become virtual. Virtual Age is an umbrella which empowers anywhere, anytime, anyone interactions defying the existing time and space limitations we encounter today. The possibilities are endless, for instance; virtual commerce, virtual banking, virtual learning, virtual government, virtual work office, virtual corporations, and so on. Much higher speed CPU’s, high speed transmission media (larger bandwidths), huge capacities of memory and sophisticated real-time virtual reality software are needed to power us into the Virtual Age. At the present rate of progress, it is projected that hardware and software limitations will be overcome within about two decades allowing the coming of the Virtual Age. Keyword: Virtual Age, Information Technology, Internet, Fourth Wave, Virtual World 1. Introduction Albert Einstein once said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. Significant developments in