A research presentation for Designing Virtual Worlds (DESC9180), Semester 2 2007, Faculty of Architecture Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, by Piotr Kulaga.

1. ‘Second Earth’
Metaverse - a vision for 3D internet
Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of existence
so much as the context in which we view them.
(Theodore Zeldin)
A presentation of research material by Piotr Kulaga and Bruno Pinto
desc9180 – Semester 2, 2007
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 1

2. ‘Second Earth’
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW, VOL. 110 / NO. 4, MIT, July/August 2007,
pp38-48.
By Wade Roush Contributing Editor
Not games or MMGs but societies.
Second Life, Entropia Universe, There,
Moove, Habbo Hotel, Kaneva.
Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth,
World Wind, Platial.
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 2

3. Second Earth
introduction
 Introduces Second Life describing
a NOAA weather map on an island
owned by University of Denver.
 Examples of scientific visualisation in SL move the story
towards the other main subject Google Earth.
 The presence of real-world data as content provides a
bridge to the core subject – a Metaverse where the two
genres meet.
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 3

4. Second Earth
‘Metaverse’ – 3D internet
 Neal Stephenson’s 1992 ‘Snow Crash’
is the vision behind many virtual worlds.
 It inspires the idea of 3D ‘mashups’ which are to be built
by auxiliary programmers for their own needs.
 Roush (after David Rolston CEO of Forterra Systems) sees
this Metaverse as a future information and communication
standard, which will replace the 2D internet.
Sketch by David Gelernter
in ‘Mirror Worlds’ 1991
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 4

5. Second Earth
new society and forums
 Second Life and Google Earth
lead the respective fields in two
of the essential components
of the proposed Metaverse.
The ungoverned shared community exemplified by
Second Life avatars.
And the ‘mirror world’ context of Google Earth.
(David Gelernter, Yale University)
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 5

6. Second Earth
economy of Metaverse
 Aimee Weber (Alyssa LaRoshe) provides an example of
the ‘real dollar’ economy in SL – the fees for the creation
of commercial presence. (The creator of the NOAA map)
 Forterra Systems build both, geospecific and geotypical
browsers for military and commercial applications.
 Virtual World real-estate is traded and used for
promotional (product and locations) and prototyping test
ground for real-world developments.
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 6

7. Second Earth
comms & ‘reality mining’
 Cory Ondrejka (LL chief technologist) says; residents of SL
communicate by shared experiences and their creations.
 People and organisations share photos personal information,
geocoded records, sensor data and KML models in Google Earth
(both privately and publicly).
Examples; US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Berlin Reichstag – German parliament.
 Universities use virtual worlds in a more formal way.
 Augmented reality applications will be introduced on a large scale –
phone to full VR applications.
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 7

8. Second Earth
merging of SL and GE
A KML model of Reichstag in
GE.
Scalability
 SL adds 120 servers per week to cope with the 25,000 members
joining each day (in 2007), but would need 2.3 billion servers and
150 nuclear power plants to replicate the dry land on earth.
 Google Earth is the most prolific platform and has been
downloaded 250 million times.
Other barriers

2 Oct 07
No access to software (server) fearing loss of control.
'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 8
'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds

9. Second Earth
third party bridging
 Multiverse Network can bridge various virtual worlds as
required by the task at hand (on the client-side).
 Intel demonstrated avatars superimposed on Google
Earth to play games (Mars Sucks).
 Daden in UK offers virtual reality chambers with avatars to
navigate real-time news feeds and geospecific data like
earthquakes.
Unype'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds
Oct 07
2 use voice-over-IP to synchronise client GE 9

10. Second Earth
why will this happen?
 Why not! Why did we adopt WWW when Gopher was available?
 Metaverse would provide a richer and more accommodating forum
for social interaction than existing personal portals or chat.
 We have a general ‘feel’ for our physical surroundings and the
world. (Gelernter)
 Geography of WWW is a meaningless graph of URLs and words.
(Gelernter)
 Increasing proliferation of location specific technology (GPS)
enables content creation and context sensitive selection.
2 Oct 07 10
2 Oct 07 'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds

11. Second Earth
concluding observations
Who, besides Google, could run it and on what platform?
 Open Source and consortium like W3
 Already a strong presence, accommodates a wide scope of
interests and proven on the server-side.
 Weak marketing, tendency to go wayward and short
release cycles.
 Microsoft
 Proven longevity, scale and educational inroads.

2 Oct 07 Uncool, a hacker (virus) target and monopolistic.
'METAVERSE - 3D INTERNET' Piotr Kulaga & Bruno Pinto - desc9180 Designing Virtual Worlds 11