New Life To Rumors Of Google Virtual World
Posted Thursday, January 25th, 2007, at 11:48 am Eastern by Mark Wallace
Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red passes on a link to the renewed rumor that Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world that would work similarly to Second Life. We’ve heard mutterings of this kind of thing before. This one comes from “an academic who heard through the Ph.D. grapevine,” which doesn’t lend it any more credence, in my book. That said, it would make an awful lot of sense. Whether it’s going on or not probably depends on whether Google’s muckety-mucks believe there’s much of a future in virtual worlds. I know that a few significant people there are at least partial believers, but I’m not sure if there’s a great deal of buy-in at high levels or not. Would be ace, if so.
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I think it’s pretty intuitive that Google will eventually drop avatars on the world. It will be great to explore earth virtually in that manner. But, as to the implication of a competitor to SL?
The challenge is in their limitations being the planet earth and their existing program architecture - land ownership? Scripted elements? customization of avatars? slow download times of other peoples’ stuff? Currently, Google Earth makes you download 3rd party overlays from 3rd party sites, and then how does Google intend to make more than one person occupy the same space? Let alone things like virtual currency and micropayments, physics, community, dispute resolution, etc etc …