3pointD.com

As Ogle Earth points out, the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth is taking place June 5-9 in San Francisco. This sounds like a very cool event, devoted to an “international vision” that “encompasses the virtual and 3-D representation of the Earth with vast amounts of scientific, natural, and cultural information that is spatially referenced and interconnected with digital knowledge archives from around the planet to describe and understand the Earth, its systems, and human activities.” This is one of the things we were kicking around earlier this year at the Metaverse Roadmap summit that looked at how various technologies might develop not just to create richer and more extensive virtual worlds but to replicate the real world in a digital medium as well, and how that might become useful in various ways. While the program for the symposium isn’t set, speakers will include Al Gore and Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers of computing as we know it today. (A call for presentations at the symposium is open until January 15.) Attendance is a bit expensive, at $650 for the whole shot, but if you can swing I imagine it will be a very interesting place to be.