Did Second Life and OpenSim just eat Google's lunch?

The answer is probably "no" but it is interesting to expore precisely why.

There is a widely held belief that Google and Microsoft could easily turn their geospatial products into mass market virtual worlds containing avatars. While virtual world products such as Twinity have indeed focused on replicating real-life locations, neither of the major players has, as far as I know, stated this as a near-term goal. Moreover, I am reminded of Cory Ondrejka's observation that the now-defunct Google Lively was room-based to facilitate balancing resource requirements, something that may well prove challenging on the scale of Google Earth. This seems to be borne out in a recent interview with Popcha!, one of the Lively third-party developers, who suggest it was a combination of economic climate, technical scaling issues and uncertain business model that ultimately did for Lively.

Having said that, Microsoft has packaged its technologies as a visual simulation product called ESP that covers topics such as disaster or emergency preparedness that overlap with avatar-based projects such as SL-based Play2Train and Forterra OLIVE. The eventual emergence of high-value but private avatar-based sims of limited scale, perhaps managed by technical partners, seems to me a more likely Microsoft entry-point to avatar-based virtual worlds though Photo Tourism is another potential avenue. At this end of the market, however, the overlap is with serious games using specialist engines, not general-purpose, mass-participation worlds like SL (nice blog on ESP in the serious games context).

Of course, geospatial content is already in SL (I've previously mentioned the CASA/Digital Urban folk from UCL who are on Second Nature). However, I've only just come across the work of Darb Dabney who has used SL to create Berkurodam (SLurl), a 1:3 scale version of the area around the BART station at Berkley (see image above), as well as a two sculpty versions (one shown below) and a much more extensive version (40 regions) in a private OpenSim. Sadly my smaller avatars failed to crunch for some reason so I couldn't go down to the station itself but this and the adjacent builds mentioned in the video are well worth a visit.

Where this gets interesting, of course, is when you consider that OpenSim will make it possible to distribute copies of sims. Indeed, Timeless Prototype is asking for a tag to help people locate such content. I've mentioned previously the possibility of running sim clones (OpenSim for now, SL eventually?). While there may be quality issues, basing them on real-life geospatial data does seem to deliver much of what people are expecting Google and Microsoft to address.