W. James Au

“What I learned as a Virtual World chronicler”

My main gig is talking about second life on my own blog “new world notes”. I was originally contracted for linden labs. I was hired to write about it as an emergent society.

People are using virtual worlds as part of their day-to-day activities, 60-70 million users have an account on a virtual world. Instead of watching tv, browsing the web, they’re going to have virtual worlds as interactivty spaces. They’re going to need maps, of worlds that don’t exist.

Showing a picture of a map from “Lord of the Rings Online”. The company mashed up their world with Google maps. You can plot your course, showing a route of Frodos trip from Rivendell. They have to think in terms of geolocations, in terms of maps. Same as if you’re going to visit Manhattan.

“A brief tour of map apps lications from my home mmo, second life”

Second life - user created online world, data is streamed, standalone app. Have 3D building tools, scripting tools. Can take in XML data from second life to the web and back. This causes interesting mashups.

Second life has a google map api to show the world. “Caladon” is a steam punk area that exists in second life, map shows that area. There’s also IBM’s campus visible. It’s interesting that you have the steam punk empire next to IBM campus and they both depend on maps. Great combination of fantasy and reality.

“Sculpty Earth, Topographic Globe Streaming Real Time Weather Data”

A globe that’s visible in second life with real live cloud data streaming onto the globe. You can walk over the globe and can see the weather patterns below you.

“David Rumsey’s Historical Map Archive, Translated Into 3D Immersive Topography”

One picture shows two maps overlaid on spheres. Other one shows mountain topography with map overlaid.

“Daden UK: Google Earth/SL Mash-Up Dynamically racks LAX Traffic”

Avatar standing on Los Angeles. Plane is visible too, data from LAX air traffic is imported into SL and rendered. Almost live represenation of air traffic going into LAX.

“Digital Urban UK: London Building/Street Data Uploaded, ‘3D-ized’ In Real Time”

“Daden UK: Google Maps Mashp With Satellite and RSS Overlay” you can interact with the mashup from with SL.

“But why immersive maps of real worlds?”

Not quite sure yet. “The ‘Memory Palace’ Argument: Rapid and profound data acquisition and retention through immersion… but we’re not sure, yet.”

The intuition is that this is going to have a transformative effect. May not be real world applications quite yet but it’s very cool.

“Then again, maybe the metaverse will just become pocket-sized:” showing a mobile version of SL. A lot of the applications might be more useful on a mobile. If you have a representation of the real world you can interact with it from within SL on your mobile.

nwn.blogs.com and the book “The Making of Second Life” by Wagner James Au.

Mirror World: Using MMOs for Real World Mapping

Technorati tags: secondlife, map, where, where2.0, where2008