Google Earth + SketchUp + GTalk = Second Life competitor???

An article in Business 2.0 suggests that Google Earth may become a virtual world like Second Life - just that Google's World will be connected to real events, places and businesses:

You can already download user-generated layers that sit on top of Google's 3-D Earth and show you, for example, the location of celebrity houses or hiking trails or famous landmarks. One dating service has even started showing people looking for partners as a Google Earth layer.

Real estate companies have started showing off virtual versions of their buildings (for sale in the real world) on Google Earth. SketchUp allows them to build entire models of their apartments, right down to the microwave oven.

Where will it end? Google Earth general manager John Hanke has said that Google Earth was partly inspired by Snow Crash's metaverse. At a recent Silicon Valley conference, he described it as a "3-D virtual world."

also Kingsley 2.0 reports

If I were Second Life, I would be worried sick about Google.
Google Earth + SketchUp + GTalk = Second Life competitor
Second Life is an online 3D virtual world that’s seen amazing success - they were on the cover of Business Week recently, reached a quarter of a million subscribers and their most successful virtual estate agent made $250,000 last year.

Now that they’ve gone and proved this model, I can see how Google would want to capitalize on it. They already have Google Earth and SketchUp, which let users create buildings and structures and share it with each other. Avatars could come pretty soon and slapping GTalk on gives presence, IM and voice interactions.

What you guys think about it?

I'm sure someone is working on something like SL, as a competitor. I wouldn't doubt it if Google is thinking about it, if not working on it right now, they have a way of keeping things quiet until they are released.

My blurry picture is better than your blurry picture!

What would Google buy up to be the avatar creation and animation system in this imagined potential Googleverse?

I don't think Google plan on creating a metaverse. Anybody who uses Google Earth can't help but ask "Wouldn't it be great if I could zoom in and see the actual buildings in 3D?". So Google are just trying to feed that desire.

But who knows? Maybe if they manage to persuade the users to add a layer of 3D buildings to Google Earth, there may come a time when alot of people start to ask - "Wouldn't it be great if I could zoom in and see people and talk to them?".

I think Google are in the business of making money and just try to meet demand, rather than try to create it. I don't think there is a high enough demand for a metaverse right now. Second Life isn't really that popular.

Things can change though!

Der. I'm rarely get insulted, but could you kindly keep up with the the hub-bub and the bizz-buzz?

It's nice to see the professionals are catching up to my imagination.

Now! If someone would kindly invent a robot Natalie Portman.

Oops. Wrong account!

MY imagination.

I guessed...

Now that's another alt exposed and gone to waste through careless error!!

Oh Jarod, you're terrible.

I kid, but to answer the OP...

Yeah, this is a threat for Second Life. It's been a threat for a while now. Hopefully their updating the back-end messaging system to be more web-like and switching the IM system to Jabber (which Google uses, and LiveJournal may be using soon) are more signs that Linden Lab is starting to treat SL like a suite of software, and not some Virtual World convention.

llHTTPRequest is the first sign that they *get* it. I'll be cautiously excited if we do, really, actually get 1.10 tomorrow.

Google moves into virtual worlds
By combining satellite maps and 3-D software, Google Earth is turning into a virtual online playground.
By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor
May 12, 2006: 3:35 PM EDT
Sign up for the Future Boy e-mail newsletter


SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - It's Google's world. We just live in it.

Online virtual worlds are a hot topic, as gamers spend more and more time playing online and virtual real estate turns into a real market. Now Google (Research) is getting into the business -- and if its plans come to fruition, the virtual world will never be the same. In fact, it may look more like the world we know than futurists ever imagined.

Google already has Google Earth, a 3-D mockup of the planet generated from satellite photos. But Google wants you to do more than just zoom through its virtual Earth. The company wants you to add on to it, too.

At the end of April the company released, for free, a popular 3-D modeling program it bought called SketchUp. Google is encouraging developers to use SketchUp to build 3-D layers on top of Google Earth. There's even a website Google provides called 3-D Warehouse, where you can demonstrate what you've built in Sketch Up.

Enter the metaverse
The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What's a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. The metaverse was Stephenson's name for a virtual world where his characters play and do business. It was a black ball 1.6 times the size of Earth, with a giant street running around its equator.

In Stephenson's novel, millions of users uploaded customized "avatars," or virtual personalities, and strolled the street, entering shops and exclusive nightclubs, conversing and trading with the metaverse's other denizens. It was, in effect, a 3-D version of the web.

Online worlds like Second Life and There.com ? not to mention online games like World of Warcraft, Lineage, and EverQuest -- are direct descendants of the metaverse vision. Entrepreneurs like Second Life creator Anshe Chung have demonstrated how to run very profitable businesses trading online real estate, avatars, and other virtual goods -- businesses that have no physical presence in the real world.

But as popular as they are, virtual worlds like these are hardly mainstream. They're a little hard to navigate, and a little too videogame-like for the average user. It's hard to imagine your mom running around in Second Life, let alone World of Warcraft.

Googling the planet
It is, however, pretty easy to imagine your mom downloading and using Google Earth (indeed, perhaps she already is).

You can already download user-generated layers that sit on top of Google's 3-D Earth and show you, for example, the location of celebrity houses or hiking trails or famous landmarks. One dating service has even started showing people looking for partners as a Google Earth layer.

Real estate companies have started showing off virtual versions of their buildings (for sale in the real world) on Google Earth. SketchUp allows them to build entire models of their apartments, right down to the microwave oven.

Where will it end? Google Earth general manager John Hanke has said that Google Earth was partly inspired by Snow Crash's metaverse. At a recent Silicon Valley conference, he described it as a "3-D virtual world."

A virtual Earth
The result could be that we'll soon populate a virtual version of planet Earth instead of the made-from-scratch metaverses like online games or Second Life. The main element Google Earth is missing today is avatars, but at least one observer believes those to be added soon.

"I would expect to see someone using Google Earth as a virtual social space by the end of the year," says Jerry Paffendorf, research director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a futurist organization.

Paffendorf isn't just sitting around waiting for the metaverse to happen, either. Last weekend he helped arrange something called the Metaverse Roadmap Summit, a gathering of programmers of virtual worlds.

The idea of the summit was to outline how we're going to get from here to the metaverse in ten years. There were major disagreements between the attendees, most notably between those who believe the Web should stay as a 2-D environment with 3-D components, and those who want the Web to become a 3-D metaverse-like environment where your avatar can call up 2-D screens if and when they need to ? say, for a word-processing program.

Those in the latter camp believe, like Paffendorf, that Google Earth is the most likely candidate to become a metaverse. Just add avatars, they say, and the possibilities are endless.

Consumers could fly into the virtual New York, go shopping in a virtual Times Square, get past the velvet rope at a virtual Studio 54 and chat with an avatar dressed as Andy Warhol. They could plan their next trip to the real New York in meticulous detail, become a detective in a Gotham noir, browse an apartment for sale, or jump into a taxi and play a driving game.

There are, in short, many more opportunities in a virtual version of the real world than in an entirely fantastical world like Second Life -- or indeed Stephenson's original vision of the metaverse.

It's early days yet, but if Google Earth continues to develop as it has since its release a mere year ago, and if developers continue to build 3-D content and businesses continue to explore using layers, then the possibilities are as boundless as the planet.

By 2016, Google Earth should be a very crowded place indeed.

____________________________________________


____________________________________________

So, has google hired any game progammers lately? If they were trying to make an interactive virtual world, I would think they would do that.

I'm usually too cautious to make predictions, but I think MySpace (My3DSpace) will be the killer app of the "metaverse". The company that succesfully markets a virtual world as an improvement on MySpace instead of as an alternative to World of Warcraft will be the one that makes this technology mainstream. That could be Google; I'm sure they think alot about MyGoogleSpace. It's hard to imagine Google having trouble with an asset server.

Or I could be wrong

It's hard to imagine your mom running around in Second Life, let alone World of Warcraft.


Screw them, I am a Grandmother and I can navigate just fine...

3D modeler with chat does not a competitor make.....



1st there is zero form of representation (avatar), this isn't a "toss in" feature.
Next there is not networking that can be on a scale of 5 people, much less 5000.
Finally, look at networked 3D software where you CAN chat... it's not the same without the "culture". SL is much more than just a platform now.

It's interesting, I can imagine my mom running around in Second Life more than I can imagine her making a web site. Especially if she figured out it was easier to "see" me in SL than to convince me to drive to scenic Frederick county.

My mom plays SL, as well as WoW (and Guild Wars, and a lot of others). She's more of a gamer than I am.

go granny! My much older aunt plays sl ... she adapted faster than I did. Got herself a few slaves, a home, a sim.... ageism is silly

Comes a time in evolutionary meta systems where one subsumes the other the + function some form of emulation or de babilizer will come along to compile on the fly and things will merge. can you say META.