Filed under: News and developments, Research by Digado

Earth (and beyond) is getting rapidly digitalized and mapped. If you use this data in rich, interactive presentations we speak of a ‘mirror world’ - an exact replica of reality in a virtual environment. This is different from the Virtual world because a virtual world is not made to reflect the physical world, but rather be a world on its own only limited by imagination. Here are 3 examples of Mirror world applications:

Google Earth

This week a news article with the peculiar title ‘How Google Earth ate our Home Town’ was posted on the TIME magazine website. The article describes how real time satellite in Nanaimo (British Columbia) could track fire-fighters in real time. Eventually the 5-year long tracking program resulted earth.nanaimo.ca:

“The site sorts and maps every business, from restaurants to car dealers, while a click of the mouse brings up the lot size for every property in the city, including the building permit number and zoning history. Homeowners can use the facility to find out specific information about their garbage collection schedule, while the city’s 150-year-old downtown core is rendered in 3D and dotted with 360-degree panoramas.”

Microsoft World Wide Telescope

While Google Earth covers accurate, and now real time data of our own little planet, Microsoft takes it one step further with their latest project: The World Wide Telescope. A ‘Google Earth’ for the universe. A completely browsable version of the universe as far as we can see. It was presented at TED just a few weeks ago and posed by ‘Six Pixels of Separation’:

Virtual + Reality

A rather remarkable application of this data collected by the programs above is the ‘Virtual + Reality’ relay. Philippe Fuchs, runs between Paris and Bejing, a 10,000 km long run, earning sponsorship per kilometre for ‘Sports without borders’ - a cause dedicated to “leveraging the power of sports to improve the quality of life for young people in developing countries and inner cities and create ties between different cultures.” Nothing new so far, but here is the twist - you can run along with him trough 3D virtual reality, and earn money per kilometre as well for this cause.

Posted on: March 17, 2008 | Share on: