Metaverse reports on Virtual Worlds, a company out of Singapore that will offer accurate 3D walk-throughs of real worldwide locations.

Called Mirror World, the technology will launch at the end of this year and will target tourism operators. In essence, the company hopes to create a virtual version of any place in the world that travel interest demands. In the press release, Virtual Worlds touts its ability to to create environments that are as “life-like as possible” and “expects to completely map the globe in phases.”

The concept of the Mirror World might make sense if it crosses over to the real – mixed reality spaces, or prototyping urban design or architecture. But I’m not sure whether worlds that “seem real” is what we really need. It harkens back to the days of Virtual Reality, when the objective was to create environments so seemingly real that we’d be fooled into thinking they were.

Today’s virtual worlds however come out of the gaming environments which proved that something doesn’t need to be realistic in order to evoke a real response. The other issue with “seem real” environments is that they don’t. Synthetic worlds that try to convince us that they’re the real thing also trigger a defense mechanism in the brain, in my opinion – “hey, this ISN’T real”, and you lose both the magic circle and the illusion that it’s real in the first place.

Having said that, the ultimate mirror world would be Google Earth or MS Virtual Earth with the idea that you could start mashing up the real with the imagined. So not sure where Mirror World would fit in if Google really does launch a virtual world…much as I also said about Twinity and other platforms that are trying to tag themselves to real world geographies.