Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D takes on Second Life
November 7, 2006 14 Comments
OK I do have a ban on use the phrase ” Killer”, but the latest post on the Virtual Earth Spaces got me thinking about a interview I heard on NPR Monday. Basically people are trying to make a buck off of Second Life by creating their own storefronts in Second Life. Why invest in such a virtual world when you could invest in the real world. Rather than going to second life to check out the new Prius, just fire up Virtual Earth 3D and visit the local showroom in your own town (or across the state) and see what they have in inventory. No sense putting crazy Second Life accessories on your new car if you can’t get them were you live. Sure it might be fun to drive the Prius off of a cliff in Second Life, but reality is where real money is made.
Imagine going on vacation and being able to walk around a city seeing where all the sites are before you visit. This has been talked about before with digital globes, but I think Microsoft just figured it out. I’m hooked guys!
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so who gets to decide where you put your ads? Can I plaster a competitor’s office with advertisements? or are there only well known locations, like their real billboard equivalents? In secondlife you buy virtual land, is MS going to start selling this in their real/virtual globe?
I like what they’ve done, I’m excited to see where all this goes.
I have no doubt this kind of thing is going to take off. In that same vein I don’t think you can let anyone locate things at any old place. Virtual billboards are one thing, but actual locations are another. I am going to go out on limb and say that next big challenge will be to improve on the precision of geocoding. Or to simply replace it with something else. Locating a business to the middle of the street (like in your example James) just isn’t going to cut it in these sorts situations. I need to know where the door is. While we are at it we should be locating things in 3 dimensional space. A business that is on the 5th floor should return a locations for the door to the building & a location ‘in’ the building (perhaps I’m asking too much, but at least the floor it’s on). Anyone got some VC money for a start up? We can start by GPSing every door in NYC. Hell… maybe we can get postal carriers equipped with GPSs to do it for us.
After installing all the necessary plugins, this was a really cool thing to see. Referencing Brian’s comment about advertising, that would be a new niche for real estate agent’s who can’t sell in this world..
I wish the navigation was a little better in that you could “float” or move with each mouse click to a place like you do in GE. Also, if you are “between” resolutions you get a DOQQ and a sat image at the same time which looks kinda clumsy. All in all, though this is pretty amazing stuff and I freak when I think about how much RAM and patience it took to run something like ERDAS Imagine or the first version of 3D analyst.
Ryan, I’m buying a XBox controller tonight so I’m excited to see how well that works for navigation vs the keyboard/mouse.
Cam,
The US Census Bureau collects very accurate geocoded points for nearly every address in the US with its Local Update of Census Addresses (LUCA) program. Unfortunately Title 13 blocks them from sharing it with anybody due to confidentiality reasons.
http://www.census.gov/geo/mod/backgrnd.html
Parcel level geocoding is a much better solution for these urban areas than street address geocoding. While parcels with good situs addresses can be rather sparse in rural areas, urban areas have a lot of info out there. Many of the urban counties have their parcel geodata available for free download.
GlobeXplorer has already done a lot of the leg work for these areas. It would be good to see them produce a parcel level geocoding service that would then default to the street address geocoder when a parcel level search failed.
well, that works well in certain parts of the world, but SecondLife allows more of a ‘global market’.
Except the cars are all left hand drive. O.o
mapz: a gis librarian blog has some information on how he implemented a parcel level geocoding system.
Real world example
Parcel level geocode walkthrough
Related, what I definitely want: a way to take a virtual train ride across major cities. I love trains, and while I’ve never used Microsoft Train Simulator — and am looking forward to Rail Simulator ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Simulator )…
a lot of the joy comes to me by the way of motion. Zooming in from afar, camscanning around a building, and such & such.
Another thing I’m particularly interested in is more export out of Second Life: sure, as has been alluded to many times, we have lotsa RL objects going into SL, but I wanna see some wack, unique furniture which found its place being birthed on the shores of Sandbox Cordova (or equivalent), and came to our offline reality.
I also believe the therapeutic usages of somewhere like Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D and similar tools have been undertalked about thus far: especially for someone so shy they want to plan a route around city blocks, but flatmaps don’t do it for them.
The metaphors don’t seem to have caught up – anchoring placemarkers with “pushpins” in a 3D context seems clumsy and frustrating now.
In vertical environments it would be nice to
scribe in z axis locked masses (Sketchup style) with a click and drag. These could be restricted to existing structure dimensions and would allow users to assemble floor-by-floor inventories of building contents or tenants – without even changing the present pushpin dialog.
Fine motor navigation around structures would need some improvement for this to work, but it could be really useful for people tracking change in cities.
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“The metaphors don’t seem to have caught up – anchoring placemarkers with “pushpins†in a 3D context seems clumsy and frustrating now.”
I know, in the course of the last year we’ve had to think totally different about how to best use these types of applications. What worked in 2005 doesn’t in 2006 and you can be sure 2007 will be even more different.
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