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There are again rumors on Google’s plans in the metaverse. According to the last rumors Google Earth might become a metaverse where users can fly and walk with their avatars and meet other people as if Google Earth were Second Life. This Google metaverse might be integrated with a social network, perhaps an evolution of Orkut with new components developed by the project Socialstream - a powerful aggregator of all information posted to Orkut, Facebook, Myspace etc. and “the mother of all social networking platforms”. Now this begins to look very interesting - the huge popularity and the wide range of practical applications of Google Earth may enable a new phase of fast growth of the metaverse industry.

Click to play video (blip.tv)

Taking advantage of the very accurate scale and proportions of Assisi in Second Life, I have made this video composition that simulates a user flying in Google Earth and entering the virtual Assisi in Second Life. This is, of course, a fake, but it suggests the idea that someday we may be able to seamlessly enter Second Life sims from Google Earth, in other words using SL as high level of detail of GE for selected locations. Of course, this does not make sense for Second Life sims that are not meant as reconstructions of real places. Google Earth is a mirror world instead of a fantasy world, and must remain true to the georeferenced reality of our planet. So, even if Google builds a massively multiuser virtual world on Google Earth, and even if it is technically much better than SL (with Google’s track record and resources this is certainly a possibility), there will still be a need for Second Life as a fantasy world, especially for those who prefer to keep their real and virtual identities separate.

But many users see the metaverse as a productivity and business tools, and some high quality reconstructions of real places exist in Second Life. Assisi, in the image above, is certainly one of them. We can imagine a Google Earth mashup with a quality-controlled directory of the best reconstructions of real places in Second Life. On a descriptive level it can be done with the existing tools that permit annotating Google Earth and Google Maps with pictures, text, twitters etc. Of course the really interesting thing would be actually entering a SL sim from GE. This can be done easily by launching Second Life from a SLURL embedded in a GE annotation - I think probably somebody is building a thematic directory of, for example, accurate reconstructions of historic or architectural landmarks in SL with pictures, text and links to SLURLs. Such thematic layers would permit SL users navigating Second Life with Google Earth or Google Maps. Of course the native SL map would still be used to navigate the fantasy part of SL.

It would be more convenient for users to enter in Second Life without having to launch a separate viewer. GE and SL are both CPU and graphics intensive applications and running both can be too much for older computers. Since the SL client’s source code is available, it would be feasible to integrate a “light Second Life client”, perhaps one with full navigation, chat and voice features but without inventory management and world editing features, in GE itself. There have been experiments on light SL clients that run in a browser, so why not in GE.

And of course there is the possibility that Google will develop a native metaverse within Google Earth. Sketchup users are already uploading 3D models of buildings to Google Earth - what is missing is a massively multiuser world of avatars. The image composition above shows my Second Life avatar flying over a virtual Madrid in Google Earth, with some of the characteristic landmarks of the city. The best publicly available description of the technical issues involved is How Google Earth [Really] Works by Avi Bar-Zeev. He is one of the founders of Keyhole, the company that launched the Keyhole viewer of high resolution satellite data, that became GE after Keyhole was bought by Google). He has also contributed to Second Life and other VR worlds, and his blog Reality Prime is one of the best references on GE, SL and online VR in general. See for example his The Word on Snow Crash and Google Earth.

There are already prototype systems where users, represented by avatars, can fly in Google Earth and meet each other. In the image above, two Unype users are meeting in a virtual Paris in Google Earth. The Unype applications permit Facebook users meeting each other in GE, and Skype users talking to each other in GE. The avatars in Unype are crude, like the 3D models curerntly available in GE, but this will change once 3D modelers and animation developers start working at them. So, Unype is a good preview of things to come. There are also multiuser videogames for the GE platform under development (see also the old website). In the meantime, I will go play with the Flight Simulator in Google Earth.