I see Jerry P (aka SNOOPYbrown Zamboni) has an entry up on the SL Future Salon (about bloody time, dude). He’s relaying news of Second Life resident Cadroe Murphy’s latest virtual world-to-real world endeavors.

In a nutshell (and I hope I get this correct – hopefully Cadroe will comment if I don’t), Cadroe has programmed a satellite to “fly” over the virtual landscape of Second Life and, meter by meter, collect height data (B&W images are often used to represent geographic data of this sort; peaks are white and valleys are black). This data is probably collected in an onboard code array (aka satellite’s hard drive), and then emailed out to him in real life when the satellite is finished with a sim (a segment of the landmass; there is one real life server at Linden Lab for every “sim” in SL). With each sim’s height data, he can combine them to reflect the sim layout in SL and then create a full 3D representation of the virtual world in a 3D app – such as 3DStudio Max or Maya or Terragen. And now he’s released his SpinMass Grid Chart application for people to play with and use for their own purposes – including I guess doing something like creating a GoogleMap hack. Neat.

What I’d like to see next from Cadroe is some 3D spatial carving. Data collection might not be all that bad, but the algorithm for combining it all might be tough (“carving” was used in the film “Minority Report” to create the consumer hologram f/x). But he’d have an advantage over Google: while they’re sending out trucks with lasers, he can make a ground-level satellite to record data horizontally at different angles. I’d say he has the advantage. Anyway, cool stuff all around.

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