virtual worlds are becoming more like the real world
TRANSCRIPT
YOU are in a foreign city. Instead
of lugging a guidebook around,
you put on a pair of chic glasses.
As you walk down the street, the
lenses become semi-transparent
monitors that feed your eyes with
information about the buildings
and streets around you, maybe
giving you directions to a shoe
shop, or the nearest place that
sells ice cream.
This, say many researchers,
is the future of virtual reality.
Unlike the fantasy space of
virtual worlds like Second Life,
the world of the networked
glasses is there to enhance the
real one. It can be used to map
objects, instructions or data onto
what you see through the glasses
in a way that is, hopefully,
relevant and useful.
“You can do all of this with
technology that’s available now,”
says Amy Jo Kim, who teaches
game design at the University
of Southern California in Los
Angeles. Such glasses are already
being used to augment the sight
of people with tunnel vision by
superimposing a sketch of a wider
field of view onto what the person
can see. Kim believes this kind
of technology will soon evolve
to become a reality augmentation
or “digital filter” over real life.
“We’ll drape digital magic over
the real world,” says futurist
Stewart Brand, who is based in
Sausalito, California.
Although people will continue
to inhabit fantasy worlds –
precisely because that’s what they
like about them – for those who
don’t really “get” Second Life,
digital glasses might be the first
use of a virtual world that makes
sense to them.
Despite the hype surrounding
Second Life, relatively few people
actually use it. That’s partly
because of the fantastical
weirdness of its world, which
bears little relation to real
geography and can be downright
confusing. San Francisco-based
Daniel Terdiman, whose book The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life will be published in
November, says nine out of 10
people who sign up for the virtual
world never return because it is
simply “too hard to figure out”.
If the glasses sound overly
futuristic, you could just check
out the online versions of the real
world. The best example of this is
Google StreetView . It was created
from millions of panoramic
photographs taken by specially
equipped vans that drove down
every street in nine US cities,
including San Francisco. The
program allows you to walk
through a photorealistic, 3D copy
of the real city, rather than just
viewing it from above, as you do
with Google Earth. Microsoft has
Virtual worlds are starting to go beyond fantasy and take on the qualities of the real thing
a similar application called
Virtual Earth 3D ( New Scientist,
11 November 2006, p 29 ).
Stephen Chau, who helped
create StreetView, says at the
moment people are using the
application to do things like
supplement driving directions,
see what neighbourhoods look
like and pick out landmarks
before visiting them. In future
these digital cities might be
populated by avatars, preserving
many of the advantages of
Second Life – such as the ability to
change what you look like (New Scientist, 25 August, p 26) – but
this time in a world that looks just
like the real one.
There might be several
advantages to this kind of
virtual world. Mikel Maron, a
programmer in Brighton , UK,
is working on a project called
geoRSS, which aims to make
map data more portable. It works
in a similar way to standard RSS
feeds, through which a website
can send news headlines directly
to subscribers’ PCs, saving them
from having to visit numerous
sites to keep up with current
affairs. GeoRSS broadcasts
geographical information
instead. You could use it, for
example, to overlay weather
data onto a virtual representation
of a region and plan your route
PHOT
OB
YTE/
ALA
MY
“You could overlay weather data onto the virtual world to plan your route home”
You can’tbeat reality
ANNALEE NEWITZ
30 | NewScientist | 8 September 2007 www.newscientist.com
Technology Virtual worlds
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they will build their own worlds
that are as private as the buildings
their staff work in.
That’s why Nicole Yankelovich
of Sun Microsystems Laboratories
in Burlington, Massachusetts,
is building a virtual office
called MPK20 . Here employees
who work apart can meet and
brainstorm without worrying
that an avatar from Google, their
rival, will wander through and
steal their ideas. “Sun has more
than 50 per cent of its employees
working remotely,” says
Yankelovich. She says MPK20
will allow people to feed other
applications into the meeting
rooms so they can open a screen
on the wall, for example, and
work on a document together.
MPK20 is a pleasant place
to be. I take a tour, enjoying the
atmosphere of an airy atrium
surrounded by meeting rooms
and an exhibit hall, as avatars
wander back and forth.
One way or another, in the
future many more of us will be
using virtual worlds. It’s not just
a game any more… ●
home to avoid fog patches.
Maron also imagines a future
where the real world is full of
sensors that monitor everything
from pollution levels to how
crowded a place is. “Each sensor
could have a geoRSS feed,” he says.
It could send out a stream of data
about what’s happening at a
particular place. Subscribers
might plug that information into
Google StreetView, or even their
networked glasses, and get an
instant image of how many
people there are near their
favourite park bench, or how
polluted various cycle routes
home are. “I hope this will get
people more into and engaged
with reality,” Maron says.
Even for those virtual world
denizens who prefer the fantasy
of places like Second Life,
improvements are in store.
Some companies refuse to set
up shop in Second Life because
they perceive it as unsafe. They
don’t mean that their avatars
might be harassed (New Scientist,
1 September, p 28), rather that
Second Life’s underlying
technology isn’t secure enough
to support sensitive financial
transactions or to host private
business meetings.
That concern is one of the
reasons why the newly hatched
company Multiverse of Mountain
View, California, has created
software that allows people to
build their own virtual worlds.
Not only does this give people
more freedom to create their own
flavours of virtual world, it also
means that each world can have
its own level of protection : users
are free to tweak the worlds by
building in secure access controls
if they wish. For example, a bank
might want a heavily protected
server where customers can be
sure that the avatar helping them
get a loan isn’t an identity thief.
Though each Multiverse world
is separately owned, the company
has a virtual world browser that
enables users to jump between
any of the worlds built using the
company’s software. That means
you could, say, walk into a virtual
bank, deposit your paycheck, and
then surf to another world to
spend some of it playing a game,
watching a movie, or buying a
new desk. Currently, about 200
virtual worlds are being built with
Multiverse software. The software
is free but the company makes
money using the eBay business
model, skimming 10 per cent off
each financial transaction that
takes place in its network of worlds.
This set-up still means another
company is hosting your content,
though. As some companies
might want total secrecy, such as
those developing new products,
–See the Louvre through new eyes–
www.newscientist.com 8 September 2007 | NewScientist | 31
WHOSE WORLD IS IT ANYWAY?You can fly around Google’s digital
globe and explore its 3D virtual cities,
but some geographers say Google Earth
and StreetView have the potential to
present a biased view of the world.
Google Earth images can be overlaid
with anything from photographs and
notes about local businesses to full-scale
maps showing the damage caused by
bombings or floods. These can then be
found by other people looking for
information on the area in question.
The problem, says Matthew Zook,
a geographer at the University of
Kentucky in Lexington is that the
Google search algorithm works by
ranking things that are more popular
higher up. “Certain groups who are
better represented than others online
will determine how places are seen,”
he says. For example, a wealthy firm of
property developers might post a map
showing the planned redevelopment
of an inner city area, while information
posted by local campaign groups with
fewer resources, perhaps highlighting
problems with the proposed
redevelopment, might not come up in
the search results.
Already, however, control of Google
Earth is being wrested away. Because
Google designs its 3D landscapes in a
portable graphical format, developers
of other virtual worlds can literally
borrow cities and buildings from Google
Earth. The company Multiverse is
developing a virtual world right now
that is entirely populated with
buildings borrowed from Google. “It
wouldn’t be hard to pick a geography,
get models out of Google Earth, then
build a world on the fly,” says Bill
Turpin, CEO of Multiverse.
Meanwhile, dismayed that
StreetView’s panoramic photos can’t
be borrowed, hackers have already
found a way to get into StreetView
so that intrepid programmers can
feed Google’s photos into their own
mapping applications.
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