I’ve previously mentioned (most recently in this post and this one) that we can expect to see virtual constructs crossing over into the real, well here’s a tool – the first I’ve seen – for translating 3D models over into Google Maps: Screampoint’s 3dsMax to Google Earth Exporter v1.0 . It’s not much, but it’s a start. Just imagine when Google Earth includes the 3D data their real world scanning trucks have been collecting.
reBang
Sven, would it be possible right now, if messy, to push objects from Second Life into 3DsMax and then into Google Earth in a way similar to how the Quake rocket launcher was done (https://blog.rebang.com/index.php?p=403)?
Fun quote from David Gelernter’s Mirror Worlds (p. 216-217): “I can in fact believe that a Mirror World would suck the life from the thing it’s modeling into itself, like a roaring fire sucking up oxygen. The external reality becomes just a little bit…not superfluous; second-hand. Not quite Center Court. Not quite where the action is. Couldn’t it happen that, instead of the Mirror World tracking the real world, a subtle shift takes place and the real world starts tracking the Mirror World instead?”
Well, what was unique about the rocket (and an important point relative to Godin’s marketing discussion) was that it was ripped from the videostream. The point being that essentially anything we view on a monitor which is being rendered from 3D data is itself able to be recreated in 3D and even taken out to a production process pipeline. So the answer to your question is “Yes”.
Now, does the tool I used work with Second Life. It didn’t at the time I captured the rocket. I suspect this is because of the different geometric source data. One could perhaps capture an SL avatar bc that’s a triangle mesh (similar to most videogame content), but “prims” are parametric data. I’d hazard a guess that the tool is geared to capturing/translating raw polygon data and doesn’t know what to do with the tesselated prim data; the difference may actually be only a matter of format.
If the guys who wrote Hijack GL modified their code to deal with tesselated prim data, you’d be golden. You could then take that into most anything.
Interesting quote. Something along those lines occurred to me back when I was thinking about “reBang” and the issues surrounding the concept.