Second Life Future Salon: A Google Maps Walking Tour of Second Life?

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A Google Maps Walking Tour of Second Life?

Recently there's been an explosion of innovation around Google Maps, integrating GPS, annotating maps with posts and file attachments, importing address and spatial data, mixing map and ground-level views, and overlaying the world with satellite photos.

Infoworld analyst Jon Udell was in on this early, and his screencast walking tour of Keene, NH is a must-see show-off piece to get you thinking about the power of emerging geoblogging and location-aware tools. Udell says Google Maps isn't just a service, it's a service factory, and the same is absolutely true for Second Life (independent users can conceive of and bring new services to the platform).

That being the case, when do we get our walking tour of Second Life? (And can you somehow link an avatar to virtual GPS and have them draw their path on a Google Map?) I would love to have a map of Second Life that was as flexible to navigate and ask directions of as Google Maps is. Aerial photos would be amazing as well. Could users do this?

Posted by Jerry Paffendorf on April 23, 2005 | Permalink

Comments

Hi Jerry! I've been reading this blog for a couple of days now, my Jadey pointed me towards it. :)

I think there should be some way to closer correlate global coords in SL with a zoom-in to your actual avatar's travels, yes. Something that's been pointed out to me is how SMOOTH the mousewheel zoooooom is on the map screen -- I was delighted to notice the increments are no longer stepped but blend from one to the other.

Along the same lines, if you've ever played Final Fantasy or a similar RPG, then you know how the screen will suddenly jerk and spin in during a battle encounter, with a smooth transition to the combat display. (Each subsequent game seems to have done this better than the last, no surprise there!)

Well, if I could do that in SL, not necessarily to fight anyone but a more cohesive arrangement of screens so I didn't have to keep pulling the Map window up but get my gridverse-wise info at the touch of a keypress and mousewheel zip, then that would kick a donkey's ass.

It's also hoped that the Region dropdown field will become one that's TYPABLE into -- currently it is a real clunker to have to scroll through so many sims. Yeek.

Posted by: Torley | April 23, 2005 at 01:18 PM

Torley >Hi Jerry! I've been reading this blog for a couple of days now, my Jadey pointed me towards it. :)

Sweet. Hope you like it. Just getting warmed up ;-)

Thanks for your thoughts here. I'd love to see an SL map on the Web (not in SL, which would be too limited I think) that updates with new land and works more like Google Maps. When SL allows you to pull up URLs in-world, you'd have access to it there too :-) I'm sure there's work here I don't know about. If you have any resources, please share.

Posted by: Jerry Paffendorf | April 23, 2005 at 02:40 PM

Not sure how familiar you are with the various SL mapping sites.

I think I came out with the first one, SLMaps, however I can't say that I've kept it updated a lot.

What I really want to point you to is Second Life Servers (http://www.secondlifeservers.com) which I have heard is planning to have online terrain maps (as opposed to SLMaps' sims as squares).

It appears to be partially integrated with Landmarker (http://landmarker.neologasm.org/lm) which is a social landmarking tool. del.icio.us meets SL landmarks.

Since SL is a cartesian coordinate system, global positioning is easy enough. As of now, with the limited email and XML-RPC functionality we have, avatars could wear attachments that would show/track their position, or allow them to post landmarks on the fly. As XML-RPC becomes two-way, this should be even easier to implement.

Posted by: Bino Arbuckle | April 23, 2005 at 07:55 PM

Wow, thanks for the links, Bino. I'll spend some time looking at these. I also came across a site a while back where someone had programmed a bot to go around and gather data for an SL map (I'll have to dig up the URL). Any idea what the state of that stuff is?

Posted by: Jerry Paffendorf | April 24, 2005 at 08:14 AM

Jerry, you might be thinking of one of the following...

Cadroe Murphy's Cartifex, in which he placed objects in sims that recorded the terrain data, and then he made 3D Studio Max renderings of the world. (http://www.geocities.com/goreldin/Cartifex/)

Rathe Underthorn's Land Barons listing, in which he place objects in sims that recorded land ownership data. Click on the phrase "Land Barons" to see his map (you can click on the individual sims too)
(http://www.thirty4.com/~second/barons.html)

Adam Zaius' Second Server Maps. He used to have terrain, ownership, and land price maps. I believe he did actually use a fleet of satellites to gather his data. (http://maps.secondserver.net)

Unfortunately all these sites are either out of date or empty now. All three have gone on to other projects, some of which involve mapping, others not.

Posted by: Bino Arbuckle | April 24, 2005 at 03:09 PM

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