There might be something fishy about Neuronet and the organization behind it. We have not heard back from them for a while now, and there are others who are raising questions about the organization, IAVRT. GigaGamez posted an update, and points to Sven Johnson who is doggedly investigating IAVRT.

It was only minutes ago that I got the heads up on a new network devoted entirely to virtual reality worlds. Before I could start writing the post, Jason over on GigaGamez beat me to the punch.

This new network, called the Neuronet, will be the world’s first network capable of meeting the data transfer speed requirements to allow for real-time immersive gaming and cinematic experiences.

The International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) is helping build out this network, which is slated to go live in 2007, and will interconnect regional virtual reality and gaming R&D consortiums.

A lot of this seems like science fiction stuff, but the recent progress made by projects like Internet2 show that higher capacity and faster speeds can lead to new applications. National Lambda Rail for instance has been working on ultra fast storage networks. Purdue University has developed technology to transmit video that is eight times more detailed than HDTV over these ultra-fast networks. Imagine virtual reality at that speed and resolution. Okay, I am getting carried away, but as you might have guessed, I am excited with these developments.

Back to Neuronet, a little dose of reality: the first consumer applications based are not likely to show up until 2009. IAVRT will also start pre-registration of Neuronet domain names which can be used to create next second generation, consumer-accessible Neuronet applications. I am currently seeking more details on this, and will update the post accordingly. There are a ton of questions on how this thing is going to work, and what are the economics of this project.