Science thrives in virtual worlds

Article about the future of data visualization and exchange.

The future may well lie in open-source virtual environments, created using tools such as OpenSim.

“We are really meant to interact in 3-D, with other people and with information,” Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski, director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, told me today during an interview in Second Life. “Because this works so well with the human perception system, as soon as there is an easy and ‘good enough’ 3-D approach, people will switch en masse.”

Google Earth adds virtual Trees, and it’s amazing

(more at Markus Breuer s Steingrau)

Milo – emotion recognizing virtual human

Bing Maps does Spatial AR Overlays

This is a amazing demo of Microsoft Bing Maps: By mapping the 3D properties of the mapped space, they can overlay image and video data with a similarity search over the mapped data:

Augmented Collaboration in Mixed Environments

The video shows a collaborative workspace, with real and Avatar participants working together via Augmented Reality and a Virtual World Environment (thus mixed). The project was developed by Nokia, IBM and VTT Finland. (Article)