Sign of how fast things are going on the whole virtual worlds front. Compare Google Earth (Keyhole acquisition) to a new entrant to the 'virtual earth' market called Earthscape. I tried it today and found the navigation a little over-reactive. Beyond features, they seem to have leap frogged and accomplished in a very short period of time what took the Keyhole team years.
Their angle seems to be to provide improved user friendly integration of community/blog type communication and tagging with real virtual earth. Seems intuitive enough. I'm glad to see the Gorilla's (Google Earth) and (Microsoft's virtual Earth) start to get competitors from the start-up world. When that happens you know the manifestation of a killer app that makes it 'stick' in our daily lives is not far off. My bet is that it will integrate a lot of the now 'hot' apps (YouTube, MySpace, Ebay...) into a better interface than static web pages.
Beyond integrating real-time satellite imagery so I can find my dog when he's off and about with an RFID tag (wasn't Steve Wozniak working on that?) there seems to be a world of opportunity waiting in this 'augmented reality' space... or at least if you combine virtual worlds, street level photography, RFID tags, wikis, etc.. you are bound to have a something great emerge. I mean, who wouldn't rather be in a world than at a desk? I'll point to the release of Earthscape as a sign that the potential and momentum has started to move things beyond the fun to serious life improving uses of virtual earth like applications (whether it's Earthscape or some other virtual earth rendition).
I'll end this blog with a question - if you have a start-up building a cool virtual world application - why wouldn't you just stick to Worldwind and bypass all the hassle of dealing with the big guys? It's free and all Java. If I want to click on the globe and give a dollar to a kid in Somalia, why should I give a penny to Google or Microsoft?
1 comment:
Michael:
Thanks for the kind words, although to be honest, we too, have spent years developing Earthscape. Robust, high performance virtual globe applications, and the server infrastructure and imagery necessary to drive them, are simply very complex and expensive systems to develop.
In answer to your question, "Why wouldn't a startup use worldwind?", I won't say they categorically should not, but rather, as is often the case, "It depends on what they want to accomplish". The fact is, commercial applications such as MS Virtual Earth, Google Earth, and yes, eventually Earthscape as well, have a level of resources and infrastructure behind them, as well as a focus on the "average" end user and application polish, that open source initiatives often (though not always) do not. If the intended audience of your application is a customer base that can do without this, then perhaps you can go this route, and hope that the goodness of those organizations hosting the imagery (and one should also consider the relative quality of it as well) continues. More often, however, companies are looking for SLA guarantees regarding availability and performance -- not an issue for an application such as a photo editor, but a big issue for modern mapping applications.
--Tom Churchill
CEO, Earthscape
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