YOU are in a foreign city. Instead

of lugging a guidebook around,

you put on a pair of chic glasses.

As you walk down the street, the

lenses become semi-transparent

monitors that feed your eyes with

information about the buildings

and streets around you, maybe

giving you directions to a shoe

shop, or the nearest place that

sells ice cream.

This, say many researchers,

is the future of virtual reality.

Unlike the fantasy space of

virtual worlds like Second Life,

the world of the networked

glasses is there to enhance the

real one. It can be used to map

objects, instructions or data onto

what you see through the glasses

in a way that is, hopefully,

relevant and useful.

“You can do all of this with

technology that’s available now,”

says Amy Jo Kim, who teaches

game design at the University

of Southern California in Los

Angeles. Such glasses are already

being used to augment the sight

of people with tunnel vision by

superimposing a sketch of a wider

field of view onto what the person

can see. Kim believes this kind

of technology will soon evolve

to become a reality augmentation

or “digital filter” over real life.

“We’ll drape digital magic over

the real world,” says futurist

Stewart Brand, who is based in

Sausalito, California.

Although people will continue

to inhabit fantasy worlds –

precisely because that’s what they

like about them – for those who

don’t really “get” Second Life,

digital glasses might be the first

use of a virtual world that makes

sense to them.

Despite the hype surrounding

Second Life, relatively few people

actually use it. That’s partly

because of the fantastical

weirdness of its world, which

bears little relation to real

geography and can be downright

confusing. San Francisco-based

Daniel Terdiman, whose book The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life will be published in

November, says nine out of 10

people who sign up for the virtual

world never return because it is

simply “too hard to figure out”.

If the glasses sound overly

futuristic, you could just check

out the online versions of the real

world. The best example of this is

Google StreetView . It was created

from millions of panoramic

photographs taken by specially

equipped vans that drove down

every street in nine US cities,

including San Francisco. The

program allows you to walk

through a photorealistic, 3D copy

of the real city, rather than just

viewing it from above, as you do

with Google Earth. Microsoft has

Virtual worlds are starting to go beyond fantasy and take on the qualities of the real thing

a similar application called

Virtual Earth 3D ( New Scientist,

11 November 2006, p 29 ).

Stephen Chau, who helped

create StreetView, says at the

moment people are using the

application to do things like

supplement driving directions,

see what neighbourhoods look

like and pick out landmarks

before visiting them. In future

these digital cities might be

populated by avatars, preserving

many of the advantages of

Second Life – such as the ability to

change what you look like (New Scientist, 25 August, p 26) – but

this time in a world that looks just

like the real one.

There might be several

advantages to this kind of

virtual world. Mikel Maron, a

programmer in Brighton , UK,

is working on a project called

geoRSS, which aims to make

map data more portable. It works

in a similar way to standard RSS

feeds, through which a website

can send news headlines directly

to subscribers’ PCs, saving them

from having to visit numerous

sites to keep up with current

affairs. GeoRSS broadcasts

geographical information

instead. You could use it, for

example, to overlay weather

data onto a virtual representation

of a region and plan your route

PHOT

OB

YTE/

ALA

MY

“You could overlay weather data onto the virtual world to plan your route home”

You can’tbeat reality

ANNALEE NEWITZ

30 | NewScientist | 8 September 2007 www.newscientist.com

Technology Virtual worlds

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they will build their own worlds

that are as private as the buildings

their staff work in.

That’s why Nicole Yankelovich

of Sun Microsystems Laboratories

in Burlington, Massachusetts,

is building a virtual office

called MPK20 . Here employees

who work apart can meet and

brainstorm without worrying

that an avatar from Google, their

rival, will wander through and

steal their ideas. “Sun has more

than 50 per cent of its employees

working remotely,” says

Yankelovich. She says MPK20

will allow people to feed other

applications into the meeting

rooms so they can open a screen

on the wall, for example, and

work on a document together.

MPK20 is a pleasant place

to be. I take a tour, enjoying the

atmosphere of an airy atrium

surrounded by meeting rooms

and an exhibit hall, as avatars

wander back and forth.

One way or another, in the

future many more of us will be

using virtual worlds. It’s not just

a game any more… ●

home to avoid fog patches.

Maron also imagines a future

where the real world is full of

sensors that monitor everything

from pollution levels to how

crowded a place is. “Each sensor

could have a geoRSS feed,” he says.

It could send out a stream of data

about what’s happening at a

particular place. Subscribers

might plug that information into

Google StreetView, or even their

networked glasses, and get an

instant image of how many

people there are near their

favourite park bench, or how

polluted various cycle routes

home are. “I hope this will get

people more into and engaged

with reality,” Maron says.

Even for those virtual world

denizens who prefer the fantasy

of places like Second Life,

improvements are in store.

Some companies refuse to set

up shop in Second Life because

they perceive it as unsafe. They

don’t mean that their avatars

might be harassed (New Scientist,

1 September, p 28), rather that

Second Life’s underlying

technology isn’t secure enough

to support sensitive financial

transactions or to host private

business meetings.

That concern is one of the

reasons why the newly hatched

company Multiverse of Mountain

View, California, has created

software that allows people to

build their own virtual worlds.

Not only does this give people

more freedom to create their own

flavours of virtual world, it also

means that each world can have

its own level of protection : users

are free to tweak the worlds by

building in secure access controls

if they wish. For example, a bank

might want a heavily protected

server where customers can be

sure that the avatar helping them

get a loan isn’t an identity thief.

Though each Multiverse world

is separately owned, the company

has a virtual world browser that

enables users to jump between

any of the worlds built using the

company’s software. That means

you could, say, walk into a virtual

bank, deposit your paycheck, and

then surf to another world to

spend some of it playing a game,

watching a movie, or buying a

new desk. Currently, about 200

virtual worlds are being built with

Multiverse software. The software

is free but the company makes

money using the eBay business

model, skimming 10 per cent off

each financial transaction that

takes place in its network of worlds.

This set-up still means another

company is hosting your content,

though. As some companies

might want total secrecy, such as

those developing new products,

–See the Louvre through new eyes–

www.newscientist.com 8 September 2007 | NewScientist | 31

WHOSE WORLD IS IT ANYWAY?You can fly around Google’s digital

globe and explore its 3D virtual cities,

but some geographers say Google Earth

and StreetView have the potential to

present a biased view of the world.

Google Earth images can be overlaid

with anything from photographs and

notes about local businesses to full-scale

maps showing the damage caused by

bombings or floods. These can then be

found by other people looking for

information on the area in question.

The problem, says Matthew Zook,

a geographer at the University of

Kentucky in Lexington is that the

Google search algorithm works by

ranking things that are more popular

higher up. “Certain groups who are

better represented than others online

will determine how places are seen,”

he says. For example, a wealthy firm of

property developers might post a map

showing the planned redevelopment

of an inner city area, while information

posted by local campaign groups with

fewer resources, perhaps highlighting

problems with the proposed

redevelopment, might not come up in

the search results.

Already, however, control of Google

Earth is being wrested away. Because

Google designs its 3D landscapes in a

portable graphical format, developers

of other virtual worlds can literally

borrow cities and buildings from Google

Earth. The company Multiverse is

developing a virtual world right now

that is entirely populated with

buildings borrowed from Google. “It

wouldn’t be hard to pick a geography,

get models out of Google Earth, then

build a world on the fly,” says Bill

Turpin, CEO of Multiverse.

Meanwhile, dismayed that

StreetView’s panoramic photos can’t

be borrowed, hackers have already

found a way to get into StreetView

so that intrepid programmers can

feed Google’s photos into their own

mapping applications.

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