A Google Metaverse?
There’s been increasing buzz about a potential Google Metaverse. A 3D, virtual world similar to Second Life, but with all the Google goodies. A Google Earth for the Internet, if you will. This is a facinating, if a bit heady, article on the potential design of the Google Metaverse. Its basic point is that 3D navigaition for the Internet will call for us to throw all of our old ideas about navigation and virtual worlds out the window and start anew. The article proposes a hexagonal grid of “homespaces”. Then it gets into Euclidean geometry, and I fall asleep.
Of course, the exciting concept of traversing the Internet or the hard drive in 3D has been paraded around for decades, and has recently gained new life with technologies such as Project Looking Glass. See this[PDF link] IEEE paper for an overview of some early attempts at 3D navigation. Virtual worlds where one “travels”, Second Life being the most prominent example, are growing at explosive rates. But the fact remains that nobody has succesfully managed to create a 3D environment for what is essentially a 2D structure. When we navigate the Internet or a file hierarchy, we always progress linearly, clicking “deeper” from one link to the next. There is never any true movement in three dimensions, and there has never been any true need, beyond the “cool” factor, to do so. Imagine having to run through a dungeon and shooting through a wave of monsters every time you want to delete some files. Yes, this has been done. Fun at first, but horribly inefficient.
A more likely virtual world is one the Business 2.0 article suggests- moving avatars added into Google Earth. With the acquisition of 3D modeling software SketchUp, Google has already populated Google Earth with realistic 3D models of many buildings. Add street-level photographs, contributed by users(like now-defunct A9 maps tried to do), and you have an accurate virtual representation of the world. Realistic virtual tourism certainly seems more plausible.
One thing is certain: If anyone can make 3D worlds easy to use and push them into the mainstream, it’s Google.
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What’s funny about this virtual Internet stuff is I remember being excited in the same way with VRML in ‘93.
And then disappointed.
It’s too bad they can’t tie in the flickr geotagged photos. Unless they buy Yahoo
Microsoft has some crazy app that can take multiple photos of the same place and generate something (3d image?) off of it. I think it was buzzing around last November.
I think Google will experience the same fate as once the Roman Empire: they ruled the world for a time and then disappeared because of to much fragmentation. Same with Google: they started with Websearch before Web 2.0, now ruling this market but will experience a heavy backlash in this area soon (I wrote an article on this subject on my website - if you want to know why…).
But as the Roman Empire once they hire even more people to do even more things beside their main businesses - for instance creating a 3D metaverse. The 3D hype came and went several times before, as did Video on the Web, Mobile, e-Commerce search etc.
Google tries to rule it all but should learn lessons from history.
Very cool concept, but people really just want to navigate quickly. So unless they can come up with something that will let people do that, then the concept is totally worthless except for gamers maybe.
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A year has passed since that post. Google still hasn’t revealed what they’re been working on.
Technologically, they have all key components: 3D technology (Google Earth), virtual building technology (SketchUp), and a wholly distributed world-wide grid with close to a million servers. They just need avatars, which are not terribly hard to create.
So what are they waiting for? I think that they’re looking into the business model. As described on those posts, this model would never make any money — it would just be something “cute”, and possibly even heavilly used, but not generate a revenue stream for Google.
The idea that companies would pay Google to be able to have their virtual headquarters, closely modeled after their real ones, has lots of conceptual issues. Technically it’s possible, but… what if Apple decides to create a virtual Apple Shop on top of the Microsoft HQ, and pays Google for that? Who will decide where you can drop your virtual presence on Google Earth? Google themselves? So would Google become a huge organsiation of lawyers looking through all the claims of “owning” a bit of the virtual world because they can prove they own the corresponding plot on the real one, too? Or would they be like DNS — “first come, first get” and sort it out on court? Would Google really enjoy a rain of lawsuits while companies outbid each other to occupy virtual space that has no relation to where they are in real life? But if the place you are becomes irrelevant, what possible benefit does a company get from renting virtual space from Google — compared to getting it in Second Life, where virtual location is not tied to the real location? The Web doesn’t “demand” real location either, eg. you can be a NYC company hosting in LA — or in Russia — and that doesn’t matter…
So I’m sure that Google is figuring out the tricky legal implications first, and how to generate some revenue from that too, before committing to anything. A friend of mine who is a manager at Google told me that they’re “baffled” at the excitement about virtual worlds (and their 50 million users) and have no clue on how to make money out of them.
Then again, that never stopped Google from investing in “cute” technology
Only time will tell…
i agreed, really a massive tool by google. A great technology and informative resource i must say.
William Gibson will be pleased. It’s finally coming true.
It’s a good meta between 2D and 3D software in google earth most of the users were benefited. Thanks for the informative invention..
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I have my doubts about this but I await in anticpation :>