It occurred to me just the other day that NOAA's Eric Hackathorn , whom I had met last year at ISDE5 , had then said that he was thinking of making a programmable virtual globe in Second Life. I fired off an email to him wondering if he'd ever followed up on that idea. Sure enough, he writes that late last year he and his game-developer wife (SL name) Zora Spoonhammer created " Sculpty Earth " which was then extensively reviewed by Wagner James Au in New World Notes . YouTube excerpt: A clever piece of hacking projects a movie of recent global cloud map images onto a transparent array floating above the Earth, letting you follow cloud patterns. Very Caspar David Friedrich of me, no? But that wasn't the end of the project. In the last few months the duo have created two more Earths , both works in progress. Below one of them you'll find a Google Maps application projected onto a plane that lets you load KML files, and which is controlled by nearby buttons. I managed to load some of my own KML content, and navigate around, albeit clumsily. And while you also can't click on the map to navigate or interact with the KML, the important point to take home from this proof of concept is that visitors are engaging in social cartography — anything that my avatar pulls up, your avatar can see too in real time. SL developers Daden Limited used similar technology in their Second Life Google Maps, blogged here a few months ago. The map also lets you g ...
Anytime
It occurred to me just the other day that NOAA's Eric Hackathorn , whom I had met last year at ISDE5 , had then said that he was thinking of making a programmable virtual globe in Second Life. I fired off an email to him wondering if he'd ever followed up on that idea. Sure enough, he writes that late last year he and his game-developer wife (SL name) Zora Spoonhammer created " Sculpty Earth " which was then extensively reviewed by Wagner James Au in New World Notes . YouTube excerpt: A clever piece of hacking projects a movie of recent global cloud map images onto a transparent array floating above the Earth, letting you follow cloud patterns. Very Caspar David Friedrich of me, no? But that wasn't the end of the project. In the last few months the duo have created two more Earths , both works in progress. Below one of them you'll find a Google Maps application projected onto a plane that lets you load KML files, and which is controlled by nearby buttons. I managed to load some of my own KML content, and navigate around, albeit clumsily. And while you also can't click on the map to navigate or interact with the KML, the important point to take home from this proof of concept is that visitors are engaging in social cartography — anything that my avatar pulls up, your avatar can see too in real time. SL developers Daden Limited used similar technology in their Second Life Google Maps, blogged here a few months ago. The map also lets you g ...