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The Archives
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03.31.10Micazook Aims to Bridge Virtuality, Google MapsMicazook, a maker of 3D games based in the UK and Poland, will soon launch a beta of its "mirror earth" 3D virtual world, currently called Project X but soon to be launched under a proper name. The company claims, despite having launched its site, that Project x "is probably the planet's largest MMO virtual world to date." It's probably best to ignore that hyperbole and instead focus on what the world aims to do: "to make mirror earth possible as a viable world and to map the entire planet earth in 3D." According to the Micazook blog, the MMO will be ...
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12.12.09The Competitive Landscape of Virtual WorldsFor those who track the virtual worlds industry the competitive landscape usually comes down to a handful of usual suspects and a bunch of hangers-on while the reality is that the 'game-changers' won't come from our traditional definitions, it will come from innovations that exist elsewhere. Not dissimilar to the game industry which had a myopic view that included consoles and large MMOs and then found itself side-swiped by casual games, virtual worlds are about to face competitive threats that won't come from the expected quarters, and which will place huge pressures on the existing platforms to adapt or die. My ...
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02.06.09Standards-Based Mirror World Under DevelopmentDamon at the Metaverse One blog recently wrote about X3D-Earth, a new 'extensible 3D (X3D) Earth project' under development by the Web 3D Consortium. X3D is intended to be used by just about everyone. The X3D Web site describes the mission: "The X3D-Earth project will create a standards-based 3D visualization infrastructure for visualizing all manner of real-world objects and information constructs in a geospatial context." It is funded by the National Science Foundation and its suppoters include the World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Geospatial Consortium. The flip-side to X3D is Google Earth (GE), which is the most widely-used mirror world ...
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02.02.09Change Comes to Washington, and I’m a Week Late: Virtual Worlds inside the BeltwaySomehow Washington and innovation seem like strange bed fellows to me, but there I was last week talking about mirror worlds at a conference hosted by In-Q-Tel for a mix of civil servants and spies or whatever, and found that they asked the kinds of questions that I've been asking and never quite answering: stuff like "what will it take to make the metaverse ubiquitous" or "what does it all mean to human identity". And what felt even stranger to me was that inside the Beltway they actually seemed to "get" virtual worlds, or this little self-selected crew did, and there ...
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05.14.08Worth Reading: MSNBC Reports on Advances of VW/RW MergerMSNBC reports on recent advances in VW programming and supercomputing, noting that one day soon, a "Matrix-style world... could be up and running in just a few years." The article summarizes advancements from researchers and scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory (increased processing speeds), the University of California at San Diego (graphics algorithms and global illumination), and Queen's University Belfast (the Sensitive Artifical Listener.) It also brings up applications for counseling, noting that there have been great advances in getting avatars to recognize subtle, non-verbal shifts in human communications - and also notes that the Sensitive Artificial Listener is based on ...
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