Sweetgreen

For those of you who don’t know, Second Life is an online virtual world. It is kind of like a massive online multiplayer game where you can chat, play, etc. Personally, I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard a lot about it from friends who play it/seen screenshots. If it sounds interesting, I suppose it’s worth checking out. And as for Google Earth, its basically like Google maps, but its more 3D, and more awesomer, in some aspects. There’s also a feature called Street View in Google Earth and maps. Basically, these Google cars go around with cameras latched on top of them, taking 360 degree panoramic shots on whatever is around every couple feet in various locations. Last year, Google has [informally] introduced the use of new technology to capture a 3D spectrum of surrounding areas. It is basically like LIDAR, which is able to capture the distance of every pixel on the map/image. Genius.

When you combine all this together, it appears Google Earth will probably be competing more with Second Life (as well as probably renaming itself to First Life, since its basing itself off of reality). It is similar to make a complete duplicate of the planet Earth, a carbon copy of all the buildings, textures, objects, etc. that make up the surface. There are a lot of possibilities with this, it sounds rather like Second Life than anything else (a virtual world of the real world). You can fly over to your favorite store, online, and buy things, online. Or you might drive, Grand Theft Auto IV style, to any destination in the world. Well, hopefully it’s more like Second Life than GTA IV, but you never know. Although, having the ability to blow up people’s houses would give psychologists, sociologists, and lawyers a lot of new clients. I also imagine not even having to download anything, you could use this whole virtual…or real, or whatever they decide to call it-interface completely in an Internet browser. I can easily imagine this technology evolving even deeper and deeper, so it’ll be interesting what Google comes up with. And, I would say it’s not too late to invest in them.

Here are a couple clips that demonstrate some of the possibilities we already have.

This is an example of what you can do with moving pictures and creating 3D objects. Obviously, this would take a lot of time and effort on a large-scale project.

Although this is with Microsoft, it’s rather similar to what I was talking about.

This is what Google Earth can do already, which still seems amazing.

I find this video to be amazing. Very impressive stuff. Imagine Google Earth looking like this.

Here is a possible way to implement avatars. You can simply use a 3D model automatically generated from one of your display pictures.

And I found this to be pretty funny

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