3pointD.com

It’s Ogle Earth again, this time with a very cool tour of a few spots in Google Earth that you access from within a video podcast. All it is, really, is KML links embedded in a podcast, but it’s a very nice proof of concept. Watch the podcast, click the links as they come up, and you’re automatically flown within Google Earth to the locations in question. You can do this from within Google Earth’s own Web browser, apparently, which would be extra useful — although I couldn’t manage to get the links to work on my PC, for some reason, and on my Mac I couldn’t get the GEarth Web browser to come up, so I haven’t actually looked at it this way, only from Firefox. But it works fine that way, and opens up some very cool new multi-media possibilities. I look forward to more.

VRCO Inc. is a company that specializes in creating interactive 3D visual representations of various kinds. “VRCO’s business is immersive environments and we wish to enable as many applications as possible,” reads its Web site. A lot of its products seem to be middleware apps that allow other apps to communicate in 3D, or which translate between “flat” data into 3D representations. Now, Ogle Earth has posted a comment from VRCO senior software engineer Todd Yocum, in which Yocum describes his company as being “probably the closest there is to having GE in a Metaverse at the moment.” (more…)