Influential research firm Gartner recently posted its 2012 "hype cycle" chart of emerging technologies, and there's a small but significant change: Virtual worlds, which were at the very bottom of the Trough of Disillusionment in Gartner's 2011...
Back in 2007, by the way, Gartner predicted that 50 million people would use virtual worlds in 2011. If you count MMOs and web-based 2.5D virtual worlds in that category, the number was actually far more than that -- closer to 100 million.