With the camera already in place, software and hardware will continue to evolve it into the discerning eye, capturing your facial expressions and movements for transfer to the virtual environments. With this level of interaction, will come an explosion of chat terrains.  The easiest application of a virtual world - long before any other - is to facilitate an interesting back drop for the chatters.  This is not new and has been in practice by many organizations for years, as VRML based worlds.

The wide-screen will push you away from the desk so any hand movements will be at a comfortable height - probably laying on your lap as fingers and wrists move intuitively through the new info sphere.  Hand movements will be like the minimal 2 inch push to move the cursor from bottom to top of screen.  The duet of mouse movement to cursor movement will go hand in hand with the double duet of hands to virtual hands.  The new overused office joke will be, "sure your just checking your mail".  The camera will give us a new fascination that reaches to the core of the computers insidious hook.  As physical creatures we will never tire of being able to do things with our virtual hands that we never experienced in real life.  The automatic response to that statement still cripples us, "but its not real, get a life, what are we running from".  We are more mental than we are willing to admit, and it is only by the speed at which this technology hits us - that we react to it as if we didn't feel the same, about the TV, radio, or the evils of the written word.  The computer is pursuing something right in front of our eyes we have always wanted - since the days of drawing on rock.  To control, interact with the environment (counting the info sphere/virtual worlds as spaces to explore), have influence, create.  Is this essay wandering?  Or is it directly addressing the big cultural question, a global one? A question that can't be answered, but will be explored more every day.

What will the Interactive Industry bring us?  Complete control and interactivity. You will walk into the room and immediately start talking to your computer (intelligent agent - which automatically detects voice security issues - to enable certain functions versus allowing credit card use by the children), "Put me on a fishing wharf in Brazil - I want to look for some art pottery under $100" - as a transition scene while the computer calls up and creates your request - your view (POV) may show flying through the clouds and then your ambient sounds and Brazilian view fade in - the computer asks - "is this for Andy or Matt?" - (personalizing will be an even greater hook for the computer) - "make it for both" - the computer eye/camera picks up your subconscious head motions and you are moving past stalls of pottery art - "lets make it something with horses" - the pottery within sight transforms to figurines - after several minutes of enjoying the sights and the sounds of the tide slapping against the pier - you see an Ancient Greek style vase with horses running around it - you move your hands forward and virtual hands pop into the screen - your hands and the virtual hands are in perfect duet as you pick up the vase and turn it around in your hands - "Wow - I love it - get one for everyone in the family and me" - you get up and leave the room while the computer trades information with the specific vendor of the piece you chose - credit numbers and all business is completed in a second. Make me fly.

The screen will bring us something we may have lost by way of TV.  As art, the motion picture is limited to what already exists or whatever physical setting can be produced for it.  For now the limitations of the virtual producer require the creation of the full set, within a world, the user is required to walk around in.  Interactivity will slow the movie down.  Conversation will slow the movie down. All this interaction may be slower than other methods of information gathering, but the trade off is the feed to curiosity and/or better communication, and information gathering.  At the same time we are experiencing interactions in an hour that may take weeks outside of La La Land.  Art pieces too expensive and physically unrealistic in reality.  So it is the weighing of mission speed versus the amount of interactive experience you would lose with out the virtual info sphere.

We will find many reasons to get pulled into the dynamic.  It will be intense enough,  we wake in the morning thinking about it.  Our little world will be personalized to the utmost around our personality - private and public.  The voice coming out of the computer will be adjusted for volume, pitch, gender, and you may have several voices ready at your beck and call.  It will know you because you either talk to it, or through it, too much.  Because you will find an excuse to check it out.   Aren't we due for another indoor exercise fad? Another great excuse to spend hours on the phone/virtual world chat.

For now the interactive industry is the dream holder, for all that is virtual worlds. The rest of the world knows very little of the promise developing in the mechanism that will change the face of the other 3 winds: Art, WWW, and E-Commerce.