Virtual worlds are moving on from the fantasy of Second
Life to enhance our experiences in the real world
Annalee Newitz
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 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 a similar application called
Virtual Earth 3D .
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 (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
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 (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, 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...Whose world is it
anyway? Annalee Newitz
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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