If you think of the virtual world Second Life as being like the Internet was in 1993, you have a fair sense of the development path that virtual representation has yet to travel down. And perhaps this helps to imagine just how big its future will be.

To gain this sobering perspective you should watch this video of Robert Scoble and Larry Magid interviewing IBM developer Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who specialized in IBM’s ventures into virtual environments.

It’s 21 minutes you have to set aside if you want to be able to think clearly about Second Life and the virtual economy, and I highly encourage you to watch it for that great sense of perspective. I’ll highlight some points from the interview for you here.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger spent a long time with supercomputing, and knows the need to represent the vast answers obtained in visualizations. He places virtual environments on a similar scale, talking about the complexuities of human behavior that we are now capturing into software.

A lot of what’s happening now is building the infrastrucutre and standards necessary for platforms to connect and for virtual communities – business and institutional specialized environments – to arise and flourish. The innovations won’t come from technology, they’ll come from business processes, made often by non-technical people.

Scoble and Magid get sidetracked on the minor issues like ID management, because they want these worlds now, and are already trying to figure out the protocols and etiquette. But Wladawsky-Berger brings it back continually to his expert generalized overview – often by citing the singular human example, and still managing somehow to give a sense of the vastness of the world he’s placing this in.

He takes an industry like healthcare, and posits the spontaneous arising of communities of certain specific disease patients, cancer for example, where people gather and share resources and communications. He clearly sees the power of such communities, agitating within markets and even pushing against paradigms. It becomes apparent that this is part of the big picture IBM is looking at: enabling entire vertical industries with developer platforms and tools.

The vision and calm sense of Dr. Wladawsky-Berger show us how long we have to wait, and also where the game is now. For developers and savvy entrepreneurs, with smart marketing, there are already margins to be played in the virtual worlds (see my accompanying reference guide to this) – and it will only gain in strength.