By Dan Simmons
Reporter, BBC Click
The idea of having a virtual you following the real you around may seem rather strange - for those of us used to having our feet firmly on the ground.
But the creation of a virtual Berlin lets people be in two places at the same time - as 20km of the city has been faithfully replicated into an online world.
By the end of 2008, 50,000 buildings in the German capital are expected to have been copied into the virtual world.
“While Second Life and others worlds offer some stylised versions of cities - Twinity uses the 3D mapping data currently used for things like satnav and Google Earth,” said Jochen Hummel, the chief executive of Metaversum - owner of Twinity.
“One by one each building is then made to look as it would in the real world,” he said. more>>>
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December 2nd, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Imagine:
Your phone tells Second Life where you are in the real world, replicating you in a Second Life replica of your city. Your friends can then see where you are by seeing where you are in Second Life per the triangulation on your phone.
Applications:
-Finding people and being found instantly.
-Being alerted when someone is near for an impromptu rendezvous or to avoid detection.
-Monitoring children.
-Getting to someone without having to ask them for directions.
-Monitoring population statistics to help develop theory or obtain head-counts.
-Locating lost or missing persons.
-Transparency to keep the information in the open and hard to abuse.