3pointD.com

Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company (who sponsor this blog) is pretty excited to have gotten the go-ahead to give a brief presentation at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, June 13-14 in San Jose CA. Jerry will be talking about some new ways to connect the virtual to the real that the Sheep are working on, including the idea of adding a virtual layer atop Google Earth. One effect this might have is to turn an app like Google Earth into a portal to useful locations in the virtual world. Here’s how.

Imagine panning around Google Earth and coming across a Second Life icon like the one in the SLurlPane at the top of the right sidebar here. Click the icon and you’re launched into a 3D virtual re-creation of the spot you were looking at. Via your avatar, you can explore the territory, meet friends or clients, shop, work on your prototyping project, check out the live band being streamed into a virtual nightclub, or any number of other things.

This kind of interface is something that I think may be quite possible even now. It just needs someone to build it. Here are the ingredients:

Google Earth
The Google Earth Keyhole Markup Language
Second Life
The Second Life map API

And since KML “lets you share useful annotations and view thousands of data points created by Google Earth users,” according to the site, it shouldn’t be difficult to make collaborative versions of the app. No reason you couldn’t fire up your Google Earth and see the businesses, schools, tourist attractions, etc., that have been added to the virtual world beyond it, pan on over, click, and you’re there.