Given the pace of internet adoption, and the fact that people often have more than one avatar, there will soon be more avatars than humans, at least in the industrialised world.
How, if at all, this will change society is fascinating to predict. Dozens of companies are researching advanced versions of virtual worlds.
And as computers get more powerful, screens bigger and slimmer, with high definition television around the corner, the prospects are endless. Admittedly, the flagship of three-dimensional worlds, Second Life (SL), has been having a bad time of it this month.
It had its first big financial crash when the Ginko bank failed with debts worth $700,000 (£350,000), leaving depositors in the real world suffering the consequences.
It is true that SL’s residents come and go but this is unsurprising since, unless you are actively involved in building, shopping or partying, then a space that is already eight times the size of Manhattan can be a pretty empty place to get lost in (just like the real world).
The race to build a better virtual world is already leaving the Arctic land grab in the shadows. The winner could be Google Earth, which recently added photographs of streets to its zoom-in model of the planet. But it faces big competition from others such as Entropia Universe, the Swedish virtual world that recently signed a deal with the Beijing municipality to build a virtual universe able to handle 7 million users at any one moment.
Virtual worlds are a natural space for social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook to migrate to in the future since friends can meet and chat together and maybe even watch real football matches together online.
The likes of Bebo don’t think this will happen. Their plans are dominated by a mass migration of social networks to mobile phones.
As Baroness Greenfield observed: “Offering people the chance to have a permanent soap opera going on in which they can participate will be even more pervasive than reality TV such as Big Brother.”