My good friend John Helie emailed me today about the Microsoft Photosynth project and its potential to flesh out the next generation of the net. John has been playing with this technology for years-- he actually got one of the earliest VRML demos from Mark Pesce where they walked through a graphical 3D representation of a neighborhood in San Francisco, so this isn't anything too new for him.
I think that Photosynth is a cool idea, and it's beautiful code... but it seems pretty impractical. As neat as it sounds to walk through photographs, it's pretty disorienting. Personally, I think something like this is more interesting:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18911/page1/
Instead of walking through photos, you could just put icons into the virtual landscape that would let you browse photos taken from that perspective. You'd walk through the 3d, but you'd have access to the 2d as well. As Wade Roush puts it in the article:
"...the navigation tools provided by Second Life--users can fly and hover like Superman and zoom between micro and macro views of any object--make it an excellent place to investigate phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to visualize or understand...
...while virtual worlds are good for basic instruction and data representation, professionals aren't yet rushing to use them to analyze large amounts of spatial information. For that, they stick to specialized design, animation, modeling, and mapping software from companies like Autodesk and ESRI. But there's another new genre of 3-D visualization tools that are accessible to both professionals and average Internet users: "virtual globe" programs such as Google Earth, Microsoft's Virtual Earth, and NASA's open-source World Wind...
Even as social virtual worlds incorporate a growing amount of real-world data, virtual globes and their 2-D counterparts, Web maps, are getting more personal and immersive. Digital maps are becoming a substrate for what Di-Ann Eisnor, CEO of the mapping site Platial in Portland, OR, calls "neogeography": an explosion of user-created content, such as travel photos and blog posts, pinned to specific locations (see "Killer Maps," October 2005). Using Platial's map annotation software, people have created public maps full of details about everything from the history of genocide to spots for romance. Google has now built a similar annotation feature directly into Google Maps. "The idea that maps can be emotional things to interact with is fairly new," says Eisnor. "But I can imagine a time when the base map is just a frame of reference, and there is much more emphasis on the reviews, opinions, photos, and everything else that fits on top."
As these two trends continue from opposite directions, it's natural to ask what will happen when Second Life and Google Earth, or services like them, actually meet. Because meet they will, whether or not their owners are the ones driving their integration."
I think these digital spaces will become our new uncharted geography. But they will be essentially infinite, both in space and possibility. It will be interesting to see what environments emerge wholly from the mind of man.