The Emerging Technology Conference is just winding up at MIT, featuring luminaries from a variety of industries telling us all a bit about what they're working on. Yesterday's "Second Earth" session was streamed into Second Life on Dr. Dobb's Island and featured panelists working on virtual environments that are generated from data gathered from the real world.
Social virtual worlds such as Second Life and mapping tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth are beginning to overlap, perhaps foreshadowing the advent of an immersive, 3-D “metaverse” similar to those described in the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. How do today’s projects relate to the ultimate vision of an information-rich metaverse, and how could that metaverse change the way we do business?
The panelists included: John Lester, Boston Operations Director, Linden Lab; John Hanke, Director, Google Earth and Maps; Gur Kim Chi, Software Architect, Microsoft Virtual Earth; Jerry Paffendorf, Cofounder, WelloHorld. Each gave us a quick rundown on what they've worked on in the past, what they're working on now, and how it all might change the way we live.
Jerry Paffendorf
Beginning with a quick overview of the accomplishments of the Metaverse Roadmap in projecting the future uses of virtual worlds, Paffendorf covered a few of the more interesting experiments in mixing real world data with virutal environments. He told the story of "Destroy Television", an avatar in Second Life that automatically uploads screen captures and proximity data to Flickr every few minutes, and the art show that followed.
He also covered Twittervision, the mashup between Google Maps and Twitter that gives you a live view of incoming tweets and what points in the world those messages are coming from. In another example, he showed how modern online maps can be easily adopted. The independent film Four Eyed Monsters and their promised to show their movie at every city with 150 people interested, and created a Google Maps and Google Earth mashup to show where the main supporters were from (see above).
John Lester (Pathfinder Linden)
For the most part Lester focused on attempts by Linden Lab to make Second Life more immersive. This involved the properties of spatial voice that give people an auditory sense of space, as well as allowing the users to fine-tune the lighting and sky of the 3D environment to make a scene look just right. (He also mentioned that he fully expects a trade in Windlight Presets when they release it to the general public.) There was also mention of "sculpties" - the ability to create complex and organic shapes.
In an examination of why virtual worlds in general are immersive, he broke it down into five things that the human brain is very good at doing:
- Navigate a 3D envronment
- Communicate and collaborate with other people in the formation of communities
- Learn through shared experiences
- Use tools (our minds were made for mergers)
- Take partial data and create something whole (tiger in the grass)
Lester was saying how we don't necessarily need virtual reality goggles and gloves to feel like we're in a world, we just need enough to make the mental leap. Humans don't need every sense fooled, we just need enough data to see the possibilities and then live in those possibilities. In the backchat Evian Argus astutely related this to "Gestalt psychology", the phenomena of the brain that allows it to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Gur Kim Chi
As the Software Architect for Microsoft Virtual Earth, he was able to give us an insider's look at how the maps are generated. A special camera is hung below an airplane, and it's hooked up to a unit running 14 copies of Windows XP to generate the data as they go.
He also demonstrated some possible uses for 3D environments that mirror reality. At one point he brought up an ad for a house that had several photos and said that it was very private. Then, using the software, he was able to go to that neighborhood and take a look at how all of the houses surrounding this one were, in fact, crowded around it and that there wasn't much privacy at all. This was a great illustration of an important point: an ad just gives us one version of reality, but with these new technologies we have several to take advantage of.
He also went down "buzzword avenue" at the end. The last line on the last slide said "GeoWeb (3.0?)", which he sheepishly pointed out and said that he didn't really think "Web 3.0" was a good term for us to be using to describe these phenomena.
John Hanke
Google has been developing along two deparate vectors:
- Building this big basemap of the world. Currently they cover 50% of the world's population, 30% of the world's landmass. They're also adding Street View where they can.
- Allowing users to annotate and landmark the map. Example - many of the world's nude sunbathers have all been annotated. Also, a previously undiscovered roman villa was found with the maps. A Chinese nuclear submarine showed up and was annotated almost immediately.
One usage statistic really stood out: "Over 1000 human lifetimes have been spent looking at Google Maps." That's a lot of use for an application.
Moving on to Google Earth, he talked about how people were allowed to upload meshes for Google Earth. What they found was that cultural interest prevails; the meshes that people uploaded were of places that people find culturally significant.
The newest extension to Google Earth is Google Sky, a view of the stars that can also be annotated. Several people have used it already to create astronomical guidebooks and other educational applications.
In the future the success of many businesses may be determined by how well they take advantage of these technologies.
