This article is reproduced with the permission of New Scientist for exclusive use by Nova users.

Virtual reality will enhance real-world experiences
05 September 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Annalee Newitz

You are in a foreign city. Instead of lugging a guidebook around, you put on a pair of chic glasses. As you walk down the street, the lenses become semi-transparent monitors that feed your eyes with information about the buildings and streets around you, maybe giving you directions to a shoe shop, or the nearest place that sells ice cream.

This, say many researchers, is the future of virtual reality. Unlike the fantasy space of virtual worlds like Second Life, the world of the networked glasses is there to enhance the real one. It can be used to map objects, instructions or data onto what you see through the glasses in a way that is, hopefully, relevant and useful.

"You can do all of this with technology that's available now," says Amy Jo Kim, who teaches game design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Such glasses are already being used to augment the sight of people with tunnel vision by superimposing a sketch of a wider field of view onto what the person can see. Kim believes this kind of technology will soon evolve to become a reality augmentation or "digital filter" over real life. "We'll drape digital magic over the real world," says futurist Stewart Brand, who is based in Sausalito, California.

Although people will continue to inhabit fantasy worlds - precisely because that's what they like about them - for those who don't really "get" Second Life, digital glasses might be the first use of a virtual world that makes sense to them.

Despite the hype surrounding Second Life, relatively few people actually use it. That's partly because of the fantastical weirdness of its world, which bears little relation to real geography and can be downright confusing. San Francisco-based Daniel Terdiman, whose book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life will be published in November, says nine out of 10 people who sign up for the virtual world never return because it is simply "too hard to figure out".

If the glasses sound overly futuristic, you could just check out the online versions of the real world. The best example of this is Google StreetView. It was created from millions of panoramic photographs taken by specially equipped vans that drove down every street in nine US cities, including San Francisco. The program allows you to walk through a photorealistic, 3D copy of the real city, rather than just viewing it from above, as you do with Google Earth. Microsoft has a similar application called Virtual Earth 3D (New Scientist, 11 November 2006, p 29).

Stephen Chau, who helped create StreetView, says at the moment people are using the application to do things like supplement driving directions, see what neighbourhoods look like and pick out landmarks before visiting them. In future these digital cities might be populated by avatars, preserving many of the advantages of Second Life - such as the ability to change what you look like (New Scientist, 25 August, p 26) - but this time in a world that looks just like the real one.

There might be several advantages to this kind of virtual world. Mikel Maron, a programmer in Brighton, UK, is working on a project called geoRSS, which aims to make map data more portable. It works in a similar way to standard RSS feeds, through which a website can send news headlines directly to subscribers' PCs, saving them from having to visit numerous sites to keep up with current affairs. GeoRSS broadcasts geographical information instead. You could use it, for example, to overlay weather data onto a virtual representation of a region and plan your route home to avoid fog patches.

Maron also imagines a future where the real world is full of sensors that monitor everything from pollution levels to how crowded a place is. "Each sensor could have a geoRSS feed," he says. It could send out a stream of data about what's happening at a particular place. Subscribers might plug that information into Google StreetView, or even their networked glasses, and get an instant image of how many people there are near their favourite park bench, or how polluted various cycle routes home are. "I hope this will get people more into and engaged with reality," Maron says.

Even for those virtual world denizens who prefer the fantasy of places like Second Life, improvements are in store. Some companies refuse to set up shop in Second Life because they perceive it as unsafe. They don't mean that their avatars might be harassed (New Scientist, 1 September, p 28), rather that Second Life's underlying technology isn't secure enough to support sensitive financial transactions or to host private business meetings.

That concern is one of the reasons why the newly hatched company Multiverse of Mountain View, California, has created software that allows people to build their own virtual worlds. Not only does this give people more freedom to create their own flavours of virtual world, it also means that each world can have its own level of protection: users are free to tweak the worlds by building in secure access controls if they wish. For example, a bank might want a heavily protected server where customers can be sure that the avatar helping them get a loan isn't an identity thief.

Though each Multiverse world is separately owned, the company has a virtual world browser that enables users to jump between any of the worlds built using the company's software. That means you could, say, walk into a virtual bank, deposit your paycheck, and then surf to another world to spend some of it playing a game, watching a movie, or buying a new desk. Currently, about 200 virtual worlds are being built with Multiverse software. The software is free but the company makes money using the eBay business model, skimming 10 per cent off each financial transaction that takes place in its network of worlds.

This set-up still means another company is hosting your content, though. As some companies might want total secrecy, such as those developing new products, they will build their own worlds that are as private as the buildings their staff work in.

That's why Nicole Yankelovich of Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington, Massachusetts, is building a virtual office called MPK20. Here employees who work apart can meet and brainstorm without worrying that an avatar from Google, their rival, will wander through and steal their ideas. "Sun has more than 50 per cent of its employees working remotely," says Yankelovich. She says MPK20 will allow people to feed other applications into the meeting rooms so they can open a screen on the wall, for example, and work on a document together.

MPK20 is a pleasant place to be. I take a tour, enjoying the atmosphere of an airy atrium surrounded by meeting rooms and an exhibit hall, as avatars wander back and forth.

One way or another, in the future many more of us will be using virtual worlds. It's not just a game any more...

From issue 2620 of New Scientist magazine, 05 September 2007, page 30-31

Whose world is it anyway? You can fly around Google's digital globe and explore its 3D virtual cities, but some geographers say Google Earth and StreetView have the potential to present a biased view of the world. Google Earth images can be overlaid with anything from photographs and notes about local businesses to full-scale maps showing the damage caused by bombings or floods. These can then be found by other people looking for information on the area in question. The problem, says Matthew Zook, a geographer at the University of Kentucky in Lexington is that the Google search algorithm works by ranking things that are more popular higher up. "Certain groups who are better represented than others online will determine how places are seen," he says. For example, a wealthy firm of property developers might post a map showing the planned redevelopment of an inner city area, while information posted by local campaign groups with fewer resources, perhaps highlighting problems with the proposed redevelopment, might not come up in the search results. Already, however, control of Google Earth is being wrested away. Because Google designs its 3D landscapes in a portable graphical format, developers of other virtual worlds can literally borrow cities and buildings from Google Earth. The company Multiverse is developing a virtual world right now that is entirely populated with buildings borrowed from Google. "It wouldn't be hard to pick a geography, get models out of Google Earth, then build a world on the fly," says Bill Turpin, CEO of Multiverse. Meanwhile, dismayed that StreetView's panoramic photos can't be borrowed, hackers have already found a way to get into StreetView so that intrepid programmers can feed Google's photos into their own mapping applications.

For the latest from New Scientiist visit www.newscientist.com