Virtual Age: Enabling Technologies and Trends

The virtual age is the ultimate progress of information technology and knowledge-based environments into a three-dimensional virtual world. The enormous expansion of the information age by leaps and bounds along with the availability of the required tools and technologies, will bring about a fourth wave of change in near future. Virtual age is an umbrella which empowers anywhere, anytime, anyonepsilas interactions defying the existing time and space limitations we encounter today. Existence of a wide digital gap between developed and underdeveloped countries, hardware and software limitations, and lack of appropriate infrastructure are some of the problems to be overcome before the virtual age can be realized. Key evolving technologies for enabling full realization of virtual age include higher-speed CPUpsilas, higher-speed transmission media (larger bandwidths), huge capacities of memory, and a significant number of sophisticated software. These key technologies have shown exponential growth progress and it is projected that hardware and software limitations will be overcome within about two decades allowing the realization of the virtual age.