Children have such heightened capabilities to imagine that we should not be surprised that they have pushed back its frontiers with computers. As they can turn a cardboard box into a spaceship or a doll into a friend, so too can they use computers to create worlds where imagination overwhelms reality. That balance between imagination and reality is about to take a sinister turn to form a new world that changes our daily lives in fundamental ways.

As computer professionals, we proclaim the opportunities presented by the Information Age, very real opportunities to leverage our minds to do great good, but we also have a social responsibility to unmask the threats. The threat is not pornography or child predators using the internet, as many suggest, or at least that is little different from what we've faced from liquor store magazine stands, telephones, and TV. The threat is the evil we can imagine, and how the next wave will empower it.

The next wave is really a collection of four waves, heading at us from different directions and about to add together as waves often do when they reach the same destination. They have been traveling for a while, like a tsunami that barely ripples the surface of the deep ocean, and we need to understand the contribution of each wave before they merge on our shores.

The first wave is the realism of computer game animations. Quite some time into the movie 300, whispered questions drifted through the theater about whether the Spartans were real actors. From body movements to facial expressions, the fidelity was phenomenal. The Actor's Guild took fearful note how they may be replaced by zeros and ones.

The realism of video game animations is almost to that fidelity, lagging only due to bandwidth optimizations that will be arriving any day. Compare the stick figure avatars of just a few years ago to the realistic body motion of modern game sword fighters, and no one can doubt that video animation will soon rival the movie animation of 300.

This wave of realism has gone beyond sight and sound. The immersion continues with devices like Wii transducers, a sword or golf club whose motion in a human hand is instantly simulated as part of a video game. On the drawing board are game suits that will convey the superficial impact or pressure of an incoming bullet or the hug of a friend. From the medical community, we see the first versions of systems whereby computers connect directly to nerves and sensory organs to stimulate disabled body parts.

Once those evolve to inexpensive commercial computer devices, the realism of computer animations will integrate video, audio, and tactile senses that include pressure, temperature, and pain. Although only research at this point, there is at least indications that computer-to-nerve systems will also be able to send us sensations of motion, smell, and taste. With electrodes connected to specific regions of the brains of animals, scientists have been able to control fear, anger, hunger, sexual arousal, and even what appears to be happiness. Within the lifetime of most of us, some form of all of these realism enhancements will join the first wave of game animations.

The second wave, online pornography, is actually the oldest of these waves. Comparatively long before Amazon, eBay, and all other online merchants, pornography pioneered ecommerce and was the first profitable market segment of the internet. Its products were little different from X-rated magazines and videos. Its anonymity and a huge, ubiquitous selection is what has turned it into today's multi-billion-dollar industry, eclipsing the combined revenue of porn magazines and video tapes.

Note that this is largely unconnected to the sex service trades such as prostitution. This wave is primarily an imagination tool, an aid to sex fantasies, masturbation, and escapist role playing with a sex partner.

The third wave, virtual reality, is represented by online simulations such as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Civilization. Second Life replicates daily life, with many of its rudimentary activities, such as earning a living, and only a few new activities, such as flying like Superman. Civilization is an expansion of warfare simulation games, first to military support factors such as industrial production, growing to all the factors of nation forming, and now incorporating the user's formation of civilizations over time. Such virtual reality games are so comprehensive that play is measured in weeks or months, and in many cases, a permanent condition leading to an alternate lifestyle.

The appeal of virtual reality is not based on vague opinions. It can be accurately counted as the number of user accounts signed up on the various online simulations, and the amount of money involved. These are millions of users, and in the case of Second Life, millions of dollars (not virtual dollars) changing hands per month.

One can argue that the phenomenal growth of social networks like MySpace and Facebook are yet another wave, but they have merged with the virtual reality wave as they have grown into virtual communities composed not of real members but the members they wish to be. The shift began with selecting the most flattering picture, quickly followed by favorable adjustments to age and weight. The rationale of identity protection via anonymity and misinformation grew into an internet culture that devalued truth and replaced it with the value of imagination. Online simulations and social networks have merged into a parallel world of virtual reality that delivers on the promise of escapism far better than alcohol or drugs ever could.

The fourth wave represents the current evolutionary phase of video games going by the acronym MMORPG, Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. In simplest terms, MMORPGs are just the virtual reality players leveraging the emerging tools of imagination to have fun. MMORPGs began as player-on-computer versions of arcade games, turning into player-on-player games across the internet. The arcade shoot-em-ups quickly evolved into battlefield simulations where each squad member is a human, surrounded by the incredible realism of the graphics of the first wave and growing to include the vast numbers of players from the virtual community of the third wave.

Add to this community the NPCs (Non Playable Characters) that are part of all MMORPGs. NPCs are computer-generated people and creatures joining in the games. They started as little more than self-propelled targets in the shot-em-ups, but have grown in sophistication to powerful adversaries, trading partners, allies, and complete nations.

To measure the popularity of this form of entertainment, compare it to Hollywood movies, what many consider the peak of virtual entertainment. A successful motion picture earns $200 million in the course of its life, including ticket sales, DVDs, TV, and toy replicas. A wildly successful movie earns twice that. The video game Grand Theft Auto, in its release as a MMORPG, earned $½ billion on its first day. Humans now spend more time on MMORPGs than all other forms of entertainment combined, including TV. Some of these users are dedicating more of their awake time to virtual reality than the other kind of reality, including school and work. Psychologists have identified online games as having the potential to become a new type of addiction as compelling as any before it.

Many of us are unaware of such fundamental changes because the virtual community is so heavily skewed to younger folks, the ones who generally do not control the media, government, or the world we notice -- but they will.

At this point, we have three waves combining to produce a virtual reality of stunningly realistic graphics inhabited by anonymous humans and their digital companions, with the humans looking for a good time. Enter the missing wave, pornography, but not as magazine foldouts and videos. So far, the MMORPG administrators have stifled the X-rated tendencies of their users, but only in a rear-guard action while they gain acceptance into the mainstream. Now that they are the mainstream, that worry will evaporate.

MMORPGs will still provide users the ability to live out fantasies of world conquest, but with nothing more than some minor software adjustments, some MMORPGs will also allow sexual conquests. Given how realistically the 300 Spartans could fight, they could certainly have sex just as realistically. The difference from the 300 movie is that the user is in the movie, along with millions of his or her colleagues, each directing his or her actions and connected in real-time to the sensory results. They could meet, date, have sex, and move on with uninhibited abandon because of the anonymity, the lack of consequences, and because each player outfitted their character to look stunningly attractive compared to the real world. No one selects a character with zits, a weight problem, or undersized breasts.

If all this grows boring, they could do what rock stars do, try all the things they were afraid to try in real life. That is where this threat turns sinister; some things should never be tried. There are no laws preventing an MMORPG from simulating children for pedophiles. There are no victims beyond the anonymous human pretending to be a child or the NPC. If a user wants to explore what it feels like to kill the child afterward, an MMORPG is a lawless and country-less stream of zeros and ones. It has only the morals of the server administrator, and as the porn websites have demonstrated, everything is for sale.

Such MMORPG operators, like the porn purveyors and pimps before them, will argue that they provide a necessary service to society by keeping their customers in virtual communities instead of the real ones. Whether that is true, or just rationalization to accept the cash, only shrinks and studies can tell. One counterargument, however, is that such MMORPGs present the perfect environment for anonymous humans to try illicit behaviors and then grow a taste for them . Another counterargument is that once an illicit tendency is nurtured, users may wish to heighten the experience by trying it in the real world. Either way, the sinister fantasy worlds will join our real world because of the four powerful waves that propel them and because only a few disorganized voices stand in their way.

The story is not likely to end there, however. Humanity is known to act like a pendulum, pushing back against the inevitable with its immutable moral compass and religious foundations. The struggle began long ago with books and movies showing rebellion against the Industrial Age and the surreal lives captured within it. Modern movies like The Truman Show and The Matrix provoked new definitions of reality, even if they could not bring themselves to the thought that humanity would willingly choose to live in a virtual reality of their own fabrication.

The definition of reality is also under assault from the scientific community. We now know that we already live in a huge MMORPG where our sensory organs have fabricated a mother's smile from the reality of a cloud of electrons.

Our lawmakers will have to redefine free speech and victimless crimes, as well as how to control the internet, a transcendental, global media harder to control than any before it. Perhaps they will conclude that the victim is the perpetrator, the MMORPG players who simulate their own cruelty until it becomes part of them.

Our religious leaders will have to redefine sin. At what point do we violate "Thou shalt not kill"? From harmless water pistol battles to a comprehensive sensory attack with blood and agony indistinguishable from the real thing, we will have to decide what the Bible or the Koran says is killing. The knee-jerk reaction is that we're on our own since the writers of thousands of years ago could never have foretold the coming of the four waves.

Interestingly however, the Bible is written in parables and maxims intentionally vague on facts that grow obsolete and full of timeless insights into the human condition. Its commandments were abbreviated not just to help memory, but also to leave them open to interpretation, as opposed to dishonest rationalization. Throughout the Bible and most religious thought, we find interwoven a fabric of hope, the concept that God is somehow sharing the adventure to insure that good triumphs over evil, at least in the big picture. We are told to have faith in a good outcome, even if we don't yet see it.

The answer may come from beyond religion, from the somewhat spiritual search for meaning intrinsic to all humans. Per Robert Burns, "The purpose of life is to have a purpose." To find that meaning or purpose within an artificial world we create does not seem likely. The weakness of the amazingly realistic MMORPGs of the future may not be the evil that lurks within, but the lack of anything good. After a while, users may grow unfulfilled with a steady diet of fantasy and imagination. Given the insatiable taste for MMORPGs among today's youth, such a change of taste may not come until the latter adult years, if at all.

Armed with little more than hope and faith, and the knowledge that in the human story that has often been enough, the super-MMORPGs of the future may become only a fraction of the human community. Perhaps the permanent players of the super-MMORPGs will be largely those who would have been victims of drugs and alcohol in a primitive time.

With such a balance in place, scientists can use the super-MMORPG communities as laboratories to better understand who we are. Just as engineers use simulations to better understand complex systems, even to derive answers available no other way, so too can sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, theologists, and philosophers leverage this research tool like no other before it. The server logs of the super-MMORPGs can provide behavioral data to an accuracy and detail unheard of with real-world surveys.

Meanwhile, our hopes rest on a young girl's tea party. Surrounded by dolls and stuffed animals that come to life, the young girl somehow understands the boundaries of her imagination. She enjoys the recreation, but not only as an escapist destination so much as an educational simulation. She is learning to be a mother, wife, and sister to the world. She is practicing to love in her real world.

Finding that balance will be key to riding atop the waves instead of drowning under them.

Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.