At the panel, Rosedale predicted that in ten years, virtual worlds will outpace the Web as the primary form of connection and access. “The technical infrastructure will be some sort of highly open and decentralized architecture,” he said. “The network of machines will be larger than the Web architecture today. Google has a couple hundred thousand machines–the virtual world will have tens of millions of hosts.”

Panelists discussed the hot-button question: whether virtual worlds will truly become a "real" business, or merely a tool for socialization and casual play. "Meetings, learning and training may be the killer apps of the virtual world. Don’t underestimate any technologies that help us do that in a more human way,” Wladawsky-Berger advised."As a result, we'll be able to do a tremendous amount more. Enterprise resource planning will be reinvented for virtual worlds."

Melissinos agrees, calling virtual worlds "critical to adoption of next-gen services," and "a multimillion-dollar marketplace across the board."

Lanier asserted that people are more courteous and better-behaved in virtual worlds-- as opposed to chat rooms, blogs and IMs-- because economic or deeply-vested emotional ties to their property means "more to lose if they're creepy," he said. He also theorized that seeing others, even as avatars, causes an empathetic response.

So, what's the big "killer app" of the virtual world? According to Lanier, it's that human civility.

[Via CNET]