Filed under: Research by Digado

GeoSim Systems released its latest mirrorworld with an impressive website and application: ‘Geosimphilli’. A fully immersive virtual environment, mirrored from the real centre of Philadelphia is the last in the Virtual Cities series. Geosim Philli offers a shopping, Virtual Tours of the city, an interactive map showing projected plans for Philadelphia in 15 years from now, localized search and it has a social element, allowing the users to interact with other Philidelphians:

GeoSim compiles gigabytes of aerial photos, street images, laser scans and geodetic measurements of Philadelphia to build an accurate 3D city model, capable of providing a genuine life simulation of the physical streets, buildings and urban landscape with the “look and feel” of a real city.

The client itself is just under 50 MB and looks to have a needlessly complicated (and dull) interface - even compared to Second Life. Trough the different views are nice the interaction with the world itself is rough it can be quite annoying to switch as each view uses different camera controls for panning, moving and zooming. The technology looks to be the ActiveWorlds client - the graphics are good but very mathematical and feel ‘cold’ due to the lack of local lighting.

The impressive part is the detail that went into modelling and texturing the city. You can really get a good view of what its like to be in ‘philli’ - the walking non-player controlled avatars and moving cars are an extremely nice touch to create a sense of a real city.The interaction with the objects is great as well - some buildings are directly linked to web data, immediately accessible from within the virtual world itself.

Over all Geosim Philly is an impressive project, great effort went into digitalizing this city and it’s content but the complexity of the interface make the 3D component an obstacle rather then a useful layer of visual feedback for the casual user. Accessibility is key for these kind of applications and it seems like there went to little time into user-research and too much time in content.

Posted on: April 6, 2008 | Share on: