Those of you who’ve been reading for a while will recognise the first two tracks and the album concept from the virtual reality essays. If anyone I worked with ever read this they’d remember this from those couple of weeks that I non-stop talked about the future.

You can find Never on 8bitcollective and chipmusic.org but unless you’ve accounts at either of those places I’d just visit the website.

Here is the last track on the release in HTML5:

Hit up never.sleep500.com and grab it.

For now instead of referring to the ubiquitous “companies” I am proposing a company by the name of “Suffice.” Suffice will be a large, multi-national affair with heaps of money. Probably some kind of product of the merger of a bunch of software, hardware and engineering firms or something convenient like that. Anyway – how the company came about is not important. Suffice will probably work with, and be subsidised by, the various governments that require Suffice’s services.

Suffice will sell realisation and will be viewed as a utility, much like a telecommunications company. To encourage realisation, the government would subsidise the cost of realisation for various things. Certain sectors of the employment industry will be the first things to be realised. Any job which is largely conducted from an office or on a computer will be prime candidate for realisation.

The company would sell most, or all, of its current real estate to Suffice (or the government, depending on who is paying for the business to be realised) and Suffice would fill this space with the computing power required to virtualise the business. In the early days this would probably consist of servers in shipping crates, much like Google’s server farms. Later, these facilities would be replaced with something more permanent.

Once realisation has become more of an everyday event, businesses will be eager to convert because they will save money by not being in the physical realm. If a business does not occupy real estate they will not pay rent. Nor do they need to conduct maintenance on their building or train their staff in basic first aid. A business that formerly occupied two floors of a large, inner city building would no longer need to pay window cleaners. Staff that exist virtually will not be as prone to physical injury in the virtual world, therefore companies will not need to train employees in first aid or have fire escape plans.

Understandably, this is seems to be a very far-fetched and imaginative idea. However, technologies exist today that could very easily be the ancestors for the future that I am examining here. Cloud computing is the process where resources are provided over the Internet. These resources are virtual and are stored on servers. The users of cloud computing access these resources through a tool like a web browser. If we take this technology to it’s conclusion, we can conceive entire companies existing virtually and being access through some kind of tool – in this case networked virtual reality.

Right now the owners of the Pirate Bay are trying to figure out a way to turn their massive, questionably legal, service into a massive, soundly legal service. They are talking to big record companies and are going to create some kind of scheme where users share their personal system resources in exchange for the Pirate Bay service. What I think this means is that the Universal Music Group are going to give people certain albums for a monthly subscription fee that is collected by the Pirate Bay. In turn, users will have the opportunity to seed these files to a large group of people consisting of other users in the Pirate Bay’s service and other people who are downloading the file from iTunes or Amazon or wherever it is they have paid for the music. The Pirate Bay will sell this pool of resources to companies and this will provide them with the resources to continue running their service.

If I understand cloud computing correctly, this will create a massive cloud of computing resources that is analogous to businesses working in realised environments: Consider the files that Pirate Bay users download and seed to be actual time a user spends on a given task. Consider the Internet to be networked virtual reality. Rather than have a user download and seed a file, have an employee complete an activity in a realised environment. Today someone might download a game and seed it to other people. Tomorrow someone might create the sequel to that game from a realised software business. The Pirate Bay provides the service for that user to seed the game today. Suffice provides the service for the development of the sequel tomorrow. Suffice will basically be turning every business it realises into clouds.

Have I done an adequate job of explaining this? I am more than happy to present examples of why I believe this is feasible. If you have lengthy thoughts on this subject, please email them to me rather than write eight-hundred words in the comment box.

Although I didn’t make it clear, the little piece of chipmusic attached to the end of the first VR essay is my debut chipmusic release. Here is my second one. They are meant to be taken in context of these essays.

But this is far into the future. Before this can happen virtual reality needs to win the hearts and minds of a young generation, who will learn to use VR for entertainment before they use it for anything functional, and their parents, who will fund the younger generation. In the same way that I started playing games on computers before learning how to use a computer to study, the younger generation will start gaming in VR before they start working in VR. My parents paid for the first computer in the house and now I pay for the computer that I use. Just like computers et al (personal mp3 players, console gaming systems) the VR product will make its way into households and handbags worldwide.

In order to get everyone throwing money at companies for VR-based products, some flagship, pioneer companies are going to need to make some pretty significant and powerful branding decisions. VR will need a catchy, easy to say and easily understandable name like, “iPod.” Apple were pretty smart when they coined the term and nothing else has really come close. I own a Sony NWA-3000 – I have for about four years – and to this day I haven’t figured out anything to call it shorter than, “mp3 player.” Generally I default to “iPod” the same way Americans call every facial tissue “Kleenex.” Different brands are going to call their different VR products different things, although this sentence is pretty vague and also fairly obvious, this will happen. What seems pretty clear to me is that the verb “virtualise” is going to be replaced.

Why? “Virtualise” is a four-syllable word. This word is too much of a mouthful to be used everyday in every situation unlike “iPod.” But before I go into that I will define what I consider “virtualise” to mean: In this context, “virtualise” is the process that an existing medium (be it television, painting, sculpture, social networking, social interaction, workplace organisation or law enforcement) goes through to become part of the world of networked virtual reality. You can say that an MMORPG like World of Warcraft or Second Life are “virtually reality” but you can not say they are “virtualised reality” if you take “virtualise” in context.

What the first few companies are going to spend billions of dollars doing is convincing the world that “virtualise” is not only one syllable too many, but that it is too literal a word for so virtual a process. I propose the verb that these companies will settle on will be “realise.” This verb is readily linked with virtual reality and it is also a verb that has many meanings. “Realise” is easy to associate with “virtual reality” as it is the verb form of the noun “reality.” In English, we already take it to mean: comprehend; make reality; make realistic; to obtain and; to achieve. One could realise that by realising an ambition to realise a realisation of Victorian society one can realise a great sum of money and subsequently realise a dream of realising wealth. Understand?

In the same way we accept this word has many meanings we will accept the new meaning. Once we have assimilated the language our realisation will be complete.

The message of the future is:

“Realise Your Dreams.”