With the highly immersive experience of the virtual environment and the ease of internet access, the online and real worlds will indeed merge almost completely.

Editor's note: This article is drawn from a blog post by the writer.

If you look at the rapid changes taking place in the online world, it's interesting to study where life online is going for consumers. Here are six trends I believe will transform living online over the next few years.

Pervasive connectivity
The trend underlying all the others is that we will be far more connected, wherever we are. Broadband speeds, while still disappointing in most countries, will continue to increase. A good way to think about it is to consider when the majority of consumers will have 100Mbps in the home. In Australia, probably not by 2010, but I would certainly hope by 2014. Gradually, WiFi will become pervasive -- and hopefully free -- in metropolitan areas. WiMax has the potential to offer high speed roaming internet access over large areas. As importantly, 3G mobile technologies that require less power and, thus, can be used for extended periods by handheld devices will enable access to the internet by anyone anywhere. The critical enabler here will be reasonable pricing of mobile data. In Australia, it is in most cases obscenely expensive, so big price falls will be required to make access pervasive. A key indicator of pervasive access is when car radios become IP-based, as this will indicate there is always good access to the internet, and all radio stations simulcast over IP.

Immersive experience
We have moved to 24-inch screens and five-speaker sound as standard for gaming. This is just the beginning of what will become completely pervasive environments for media, entertainment and participation. Video glasses will become common ways of accessing immersive video wherever you roam. 3D TV without glasses is a reality and not far from commercialisation. While 3D efforts using coloured or polarising glasses will continue for some time, the real future is in providing different images to each eye, as in Philips' 3D TV initiatives. It will also be possible to generate realistic 3D images from 2D video. While Second Life already provides a quasi-3D environment, a couple of steps beyond is where we will use video glasses, gloves and other immersive interfaces so that we will experience actually being there, rather than seeing ourselves in a virtual world. This is inevitable, the only question is when we will get there.

New interfaces
The mouse was invented in 1967, and is still the centre of human-machine interfaces. It is extraordinary that the QWERTY keyboard still dominates the lives of knowledge workers, with the fact that 80 percent of the population cannot touch-type constraining economic productivity to an enormous degree. Voice recognition and response will become widespread. Large surface interfaces such as Jeff Han's and the newly announced Microsoft Surface and, beyond that, gesture and facial expression recognition, will usher in a far more intuitive and three-dimensional way of interfacing with information and images.

Attention profiling
We are moving to a world of infinite content. The proliferation of blogs, online publications, podcasts and videos means we are swamped with information. The first phase of the response has been user-filtered content or collaborative filtering on sites such as Last.FM and scouta.com, giving us personalised recommendations. The next phase will be to develop detailed profiles of our interests and behaviours across different categories of content, so that we can access or be presented with content in a way that matches our available attention relative to the relevance and interest of the content. The two most promising initiatives in this space -- Particls and illumio -- have both been launched in the last couple of months. We can expect it to become a completely seamless process to find or be given what we want from an infinite landscape of content.

DIY apps
In our recently launched Web 2.0 Framework, I described three categories of inputs to the world of web 2.0: user generated content, opinions and applications. The next phase of the web is that anyone will be able to create their own applications. Earlier examples included Yahoo! Pipes, while Ning allowed people to set up their own social networks. More recently, Dapper and Kapow are allowing non-technical people to create and recombine the elements of the web to build new applications. IBM's QEDWiki is aimed at the corporate market, to allow end users to bypass the IT department and quickly and easily create the applications and use of corporate information that is relevant to them. Similar tools will sprout up in the consumer space, meaning that everyone, not just developers, contribute to the modular, re-combinable, emergent web.

Social revolution
The online space is being driven by powerful trends to openness, transparency and accessibility, from open source through open appliction programming interface or (API). The same trends are apparent in society at large, where expectations of openness, visibility and accountability are rapidly forcing changes in how corporations and politicians work. It is a fascinating question whether technology trends are driving social change, or whether technological development is reflecting social trends. Undoubtedly, both are true, accelerating these trends to an extraordinary degree that I believe will become a lot more evident over the next five to 10 years. This is just one facet of how the online and real worlds will merge almost completely in the coming years.

Ross Dawson is chairman of Future Exploration Network and a globally recognised keynote speaker and author. Read full bio.