3pointD.com

One of the cool Google Maps hacks on display at South by Southwest this year was Community Walk, a site that lets users create collaboratively tagged maps of real locations. But with the Second Life map API being open as well (see the SLurlPane at the top of the right sidebar here), I figured it couldn’t be a bad thing to hack a Second Life location into a Community Walk community. Not that the current incarnation is much of a hack, but if you dial into this Community Walk map, zoom out and look for the mint-green, upside-down teardrops, you’ll find links to the virtual version of two real-world locations: a Hawaiian island, and a coffee shop in Washington DC.

The R&B Coffee Shop in Washington was the site of an event in February called The Happening, which was for the most part a gathering of local artists and musicians. But there was also a “mixed reality” component to it, arranged by the Electric Sheep, whereby video of the live event was streamed into Second Life, and video of the virtual location in SL was projected on a screen at the real-life Happening. All it took was for someone (SL resident Hiro Pendragon) to build a scale model of the coffee shop in Second Life. That’s what I’m linking to in the Community Walk map, via a secondlife:// URL that launches the SL application when clicked. (The SLurlPane was slightly more complex, but still pretty simple.)

I used the coffee shop because I don’t know of any other scale re-creations in SL of real-world locations. You can wander around the coffee shop in SL and see the same art on the walls as was on the walls of the real coffeehouse during The Happening, but there’s no reason a more functional virtual location couldn’t be linked to as well. (If you can’t get into the coffee shop for some reason, try Hawaii. It’s nice there.) Here’s an idea:

A local clothing designer has a small shop in a neighborhood across town. You want to shop there, but you don’t have time. So you dial up a Community Walk map of your city and click on the shop’s SL link. You don an avatar that’s a scale model of your real-world self, and try on some clothes. A friend meets you there to tell you whether they make your bottom look fat. You order, you pay, and the clothes are delivered the next day. Better than taking a guess at Gap.com, isn’t it?

And that’s just the beginning. Commerce, work, education, play, any number of things can be enhanced by creating these kinds of hooks between the real and virtual worlds. Of course, there will always be things the real world does better. But the emerging 3pointD things sound very cool to me.