The excitement building – in some quarters – about the potential of  virtual worlds is strongly reminiscent of the early 1990s, when commercial Internet pioneers began to sense the coming dot-com revolution.

Virtual world technology isn’t new. The  “immersive” worlds of massively multi-player online role playing games (MMPORGS) have been around for a decade now, and their populations are numbered in the millions.

Now though, virtual world technology is becoming more resilient, more powerful, and critically, dozens of new and existing companies are developing applications and services aimed at businesses. New, secure private worlds are being built by private and public sector organisations, for a variety of purposes.

Today’s virtual worlds are no longer just playgrounds. Like the most advanced CAD models, they now incorporate objects with complex properties; but, unlike CAD models, they also allow intelligent beings to wander through – beings that that can do things to the world, that the world can do things to, and that can sometimes do things to each other. 

For example, a recent virtual meeting of 200 IBMers was held in a recreation of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where the avatars of the company’s chief scientist, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and CEO, Sam Palmisano, announced a $100 million investment programme in innovative technologies, including the business use of virtual worlds. This month’s cover image is taken from that meeting. 

Predictably, CIOs are being urged to explore virtual worlds as platforms for simulation and collaboration. Businesses are being promised real benefits and an opportunity to explore a new world of worlds at its birth. But, is it all more hype, or is it the next big thing?

As ever, early adopters are seeding the market with, they hope, infectious enthusiasm. But, just because they are IBM, Google, Microsoft and Cisco doesn’t mean they are right. Indeed, other critics, such as Cass Business school’s Professor Clive Holtham believe communities such as Second Life, the best-known virtual world, are little better than traps for the gullible. Other critics are less kind still.

Yet technologies have to be assessed for their potential, not just on today’s reality. There may always be limits to the potential of virtual economies, but the immersive technologies that drive them will inevitably improve.

Recently, research company Gartner was widely ridiculed for predicting that 80% of the world’s Internet users would inhabit virtual world’s by 2012. In fact, it seems that tomorrow’s reality may actually be a lot more virtual than we think.