virtual reality

It's the year 2020. Most people use mobile devices to connect to the Internet; voice-recognition and touch-based user interfaces are in greater use; and notions of privacy will have changed as the differences between personal and work time or physical and virtual reality become fewer.

Those are some of the findings from a new report, The Future of the Internet III, from the Pew Internet and American Life Project with Elon University in North Carolina.

'Universal Standards'

In the latest expansion beyond its main mission of organizing the world's information, Internet search leader Google Inc. hopes to orchestrate more fantasizing on the Web.

The Mountain View-based company unveiled a free service Tuesday in which three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in electronic rooms and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called "Lively," represents Google's answer to a 5-year-old site, Second Life, where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate through virtual reality.

Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in Second Life. A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.