In the influential cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, author Neal Stephenson envisioned a virtual world, called the Metaverse, as a successor to the Internet. In the Metaverse, everyday people take on glamorous identities in a three-dimensional immersive digital world. The book’s main character delivers pizza in real life, but in the Metaverse, he’s a warrior prince and champion sword fighter. The hugely popular Matrix movie trilogy paints a similar (though more sinister) picture of a world that blurs the lines between physical and digital reality.

Today, these fictional depictions come to life as we witness the tremendous growth of real-time, interactive virtual worlds that allow people to assume virtual identities in cyberspace. More than nine million people worldwide belong to the virtual world of Second Life, more than eight million play the online game World of Warcraft, and one-third of Korean adults socialize in CyWorld. Add to that the millions more who play The Sims Online or who visit other computer-mediated environments (CMEs) such as Webkinz, There, Whyville, Entropia Universe, MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach, and so on, and you’re looking at a lot of serious role-playing.

On these sites, people assume visual identities, or avatars, ranging from realistic versions of themselves to tricked-out versions with “exaggerated” physical characteristics or winged dragons or superheroes. Researchers are just starting to investigate how these online selves will influence consumer behavior and how the identities we choose in CMEs relate to our real life (RL) or “meat-world” identities. Already we know that when people take on avatar forms, they tend to interact with other avatars much as their meat-world selves interact with other RL people. For example, just as in the RL, males in Second Life leave more space between them when talking to other males versus females, and they are less likely to maintain eye contact than are females. And when avatars get very close to one another, they tend to look away from each other. The norms of the RL are creeping into the virtual world.

If you don’t know it already, you heard it here first: Virtual worlds will be the next huge marketing platform. Don’t miss the (virtual) boat on this one!