Join forces with Google

When I say "join", I don't mean by buying them out, or them buying SL out. More so, create a partnership, where Google's Street View technology can be implemented into SL creating numerous of cities that people can walk around in. The cities would be near accurate to real life. Offer a site rent option for stores and restaurants that actually exist in areas that are build.

I do not know how "real" you can make it look, or if you can even just take what there is of street view and implement it into SL, so people can walk around as they do. However a real picture like Street View, and an animated character from SL would look sorta weird in the mix.

Just a suggestion that would really need to be looked at more thoroughly and investigated into how to turn it into a possibility.

Take care

Yeh, I've made a few comments about this in the past, I think it would be a great idea... much better than Lively.

Particularly if they could use imposters to render avatars back into people's street view (if the viewer chose that option) so people in Google Street View could see our avatars included in the snapshots.

There is software that can take multiple overlapping views and reproduce an approximation of the original 3d object, but I suspect it would take more overlapping images than Google is currently taking.

I'm not sure how useful Google Maps would be to Second Life, especially street view, given that 1) The LDPW highway system is very much a work in progress, outside of Sansara and particularly Heterocera Atoll. How do you get a street view when there's no street yet? 2) most of these routes do not have a name, or if it does, the name isn't agreed apon and changes frequently along the route. 3) Without a recent, accurate highway map to work from, where does Google even begin?

That being said, I think Google wasted their time on Lively when a metaverse search of what's already out there is still desperately needed (no, the SL search doesn't count anymore than AltaVista counts in this day and age).

The idea is that you would have a whole new set of sims using a backdrop generated from "Street View". You seem to be thinking of a "Google Maps" view of Second Life. That's a pretty interesting idea, but I suspect you would get much better results using a remote controlled bot as a proxy.

I'd rather see a more Google Maps approach. There's plenty parts of the grid that do have a proper transportation infrastructure that doesn't leave you dependent on the teleport cop-out to get from point A to point B. Having a decent map (and maybe even driving/walking/transit directions) would be a great boon to the mainlands and larger private continents.

Like I said, that would be interesting, and useful, but it's not what the poster was talking about. And, well, SL isn't nearly big enough to need any more Google involvement than it already has in the form of the Google appliances they're using.

Pity you can't get the Street View images through the Maps API As I understand it, all they have is a hemispherical sky and a circular ground plane. You could quite easily recreate that effect with a couple of giant prims or so. Don't see why you couldn't intercept the images "for testing" if you wanted though.