Ponderings on Virtual Worlds - the technological future

Being a left-brained scientist I can't resist looking into the technologies which may shape our lives in a virtual-enabled world in years to come.A number of sources have been scoured but the 'Meatverse Roadmap' article by Smart et al. (2007) had the biggest appeal as it is both broad in its scope and bold in its predictions.
The term metaverse originated from the cyberpunk novel Snowcrash (1992) written by Neal Stephenson (as was, by the way the term avatar, derived from the Hindu work avatara meaning 'incarnation'. At the heart of this article lies a 2x2 matrix which places external vs. internal on the x-axis and simulation vs. augmentation on the y-axis. Within the four sectors created it places the various technologies, the familiar Virtual Worlds and the Mirror Worlds in the Simulation arena and the more unfamiliar 'Augmented Reality' and 'Lifelogging' aspects in the Augmentation part.
The article then goes on to explain these Metaverse technologies:

• Virtual Worlds: here it praises the social participatory aspects of environments such as SL, pointing to a future where webcams will be used to map facial images of PC users onto their virtual world avatars - well here goes your anonymity...
• Mirror Worlds: these are based on open-standards such as the main Geographic Information System (GIS) Google Earth which may be overlaid (mashed up) with other information such as GPS-data, advert videos of shops or the presence of other nearby avatars.
• Augmented Reality: This technology largely depends on the acceptance of radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags to be placed in most consumer products thus providing instantaneous information of these items surrounding you; you will never be able to mislay your glasses or car keys again!
• Lifelogging: This equates to the concept of blogging in the broadest sense to everyday activities and its implementation will be linked to the emergence of wearable computers and Webcams displaying the whereabouts and neighbourhood of the individual to a third party, family member or possibly the state. Applications given in the article are the monitoring of school children or of individuals suffering from dementia.
  At this point in time one can only speculated what effect these new tools will have in the education sector, in the next 10-15 years.
  J. Smart, J. Cascio and J. Pfaffendorf (2007) Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web. http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf