In 1992 Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash presented us with the Metaverse, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world. All this was nothing but science fiction then - the technology was not mature enough, nor the network to get the vision to its own life.
In 1999 a hardware company called Linden Lab was found that was geared towards the research and development of haptics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptics). They needed a virtual world to go with their hardware, and so in 2001 they started building what became Linden World and, later, Second Life, the 3D virtual world with user generated content, where users could interact with each other in real time.
Linden World was spread almost seamlessly across multiple servers (albeit, only a couple), and it was envisioned that one day it might become a sprawling and distributed agglomeration of third-party servers. The streaming content architecture and protocols allowed people to create content and to participate in content creation in real-time - without drowning their connections in data.
This company was actually a first mover to an industry that will gain momentum and hype throughout the world. But in the beginning nobody wanted to fund it - people did not see advantages to use the platform and the idea of a game. In one meeting the vision changed - the investors attention went from the game to the seamless, real-time, collaborative content-creation platform.
Soon "The rig" would be renamed to "Second life" and would be released to a limited testing audience in 2002. In 2003 the beta testing version was distributed. People started generating content and trying to evade taxes, but essentially Second Life was a lone player on the market for virtual reality. That also meant financial troubles. Regardless the marketing campaign of the Rosendale, the platform didn't generate a lot of users. In 2004 the complementary software started emerging - Tringo for example is an online multiplayer game, available to play inside the virtual reality platform, was created by Nathan Keir (aka Kermitt Quirk).
And then it happened - due to technological advancement as quick time media streaming, changing the user interface to easier one, better connection speeds, basically empty world, waiting to be filled with people's vision and the perceived millionaire advantage - Second life became a mass hit. Business Week wrote about it, firms started their virtual offices there and wrote press releases about them, media outlets went crazy with the stories.
This in turn generated interest in the regular user, who could download the platform, log in the virtual universe and create whatever vision he/she had in mind. Of course this was a golden mine for banks, schemes and casinos, pornography, and etc. A lot of companies as Adidas, Nike, Cisco, IBM, HP saw it as a gold PR opportunity. Many universities followed suit and establish online classes. The book publishing industry did not hesitate and actually a publishing house from Britain carried out the first virtual book fair in 2007. Publishing houses like Random House, Penguin UK, Wiley and others.
And the bigger the hype, the more users it generated. It also generated early followers:
"Utherverse" - is the universe or "Metaverse" that engulfs all of the cities that make up the environment. This is the major competitor of Second Life.
SmallWorlds - its beta was launched late 2008, it do not need download - use it from your web browser, it is highly customizable and took a lot of the users from Second life cause it was able to deal better with the generated traffic, so needed by brands.
Other competitors are IMVU, Active Worlds, Onverse, Kaneva and Blue Mars.
GOOGLE also decided to create its own virtual world and created a lot of talk and interest in the initial stages but failed miserably with their web based virtual environment - "Lively". The project was alive less than an year before its discontinuation on 31.12.2008. Not only their world failed to generate interest, but probably the time was not the right one to enter the segment. Google were at least smart enough to stop the project fast enough.
With the advancement of technology, available interest from people it is only a matter of time for the virtual life to become a regular part of life. Though there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the early market entrants - problems with funding, technological problems, legal difficulties, there is a lot of space to be explored also. One of the big pluses is ROI advantages for business and online classes for academia.
Resources: here and here, virtual news, and from wikipedia
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