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‘Second Earth’Metaverse - a vision for 3D internet

Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of existence so much as the context in which we view them.

(Theodore Zeldin)

A presentation of research material by Piotr Kulaga and Bruno Pinto

desc9180 – Semester 2, 2007

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‘Second Earth’ TECHNOLOGY REVIEW, VOL. 110 / NO. 4, MIT, July/August 2007, pp38-48.

By Wade Roush Contributing Editor

Not games or MMGs but societies.

Second Life, Entropia Universe, There, Moove, Habbo Hotel, Kaneva.

Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, World Wind, Platial.

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introduction

Introduces Second Life describing a NOAA weather map on an island owned by University of Denver.

Examples of scientific visualisation in SL move the story towards the other main subject Google Earth.

The presence of real-world data as content provides a bridge to the core subject – a Metaverse where the two genres meet.

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‘Metaverse’ – 3D internet

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 ‘Snow Crash’ is the vision behind many virtual worlds.

It inspires the idea of 3D ‘mashups’ which are to be built by auxiliary programmers for their own needs.

Roush (after David Rolston CEO of Forterra Systems) sees this Metaverse as a future information and communication standard, which will replace the 2D internet.

Sketch by David Gelernter in ‘Mirror Worlds’ 1991

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new society and forums

Second Life and Google Earth lead the respective fields in two of the essential components of the proposed Metaverse.

The ungoverned shared community exemplified by Second Life avatars.

And the ‘mirror world’ context of Google Earth. (David Gelernter, Yale University)

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economy of Metaverse

Aimee Weber (Alyssa LaRoshe) provides an example of the ‘real dollar’ economy in SL – the fees for the creation of commercial presence. (The creator of the NOAA map)

Forterra Systems build both, geospecific and geotypical browsers for military and commercial applications.

Virtual World real-estate is traded and used for promotional (product and locations) and prototyping test ground for real-world developments.

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comms & ‘reality mining’

Cory Ondrejka (LL chief technologist) says; residents of SL communicate by shared experiences and their creations.

People and organisations share photos personal information, geocoded records, sensor data and KML models in Google Earth (both privately and publicly).

Examples; US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Berlin Reichstag – German parliament.

Universities use virtual worlds in a more formal way.

Augmented reality applications will be introduced on a large scale – phone to full VR applications.

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merging of SL and GE

Scalability

SL adds 120 servers per week to cope with the 25,000 members joining each day (in 2007), but would need 2.3 billion servers and 150 nuclear power plants to replicate the dry land on earth.

Google Earth is the most prolific platform and has been downloaded 250 million times.

Other barriers

No access to software (server) fearing loss of control.

New business models would be required.

A KML model of Reichstag in GE.

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third party bridging

Multiverse Network can bridge various virtual worlds as required by the task at hand (on the client-side).

Intel demonstrated avatars superimposed on Google Earth to play games (Mars Sucks).

Daden in UK offers virtual reality chambers with avatars to navigate real-time news feeds and geospecific data like earthquakes.

Unype use voice-over-IP to synchronise client GE sessions and introduce avatars through Skype.

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why will this happen?

Why not! Why did we adopt WWW when Gopher was available?

Metaverse would provide a richer and more accommodating forum for social interaction than existing personal portals or chat.

We have a general ‘feel’ for our physical surroundings and the world. (Gelernter)

Geography of WWW is a meaningless graph of URLs and words. (Gelernter)

Increasing proliferation of location specific technology (GPS) enables content creation and context sensitive selection.

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concluding observations

Who, besides Google, could run it and on what platform?

Open Source and consortium like W3 Already a strong presence, accommodates a wide scope of

interests and proven on the server-side. Weak marketing, tendency to go wayward and short release

cycles.

Microsoft Proven longevity, scale and educational inroads. Uncool, a hacker (virus) target and monopolistic.