Geospatial Mapping Berkeley in Open Sim and Second Life

 

I was wandering through the Second Life region of Gualala recently when I randomly crashed into an extremely familiar site: the Berkeley BART station, photographically recreated on a topographic plane in 1:3 ratio. Looking around, I realized I was standing in the middle of several blocks of Berkeley, which felt a bit like walking around in Google Maps' "street view" mode. Quite by accident, it turned out, I'd stumbled into a project by Darb Dabney, in real life a geographic information systems coordinator with the actual City of Berkeley. "[S]o I had some professional interest in the 3D mapping of the BART station that went beyond typical SL folks," he told me via IM. His BART doesn't just stop at the entrance, but down into the second level. "I spent a couple of surreptitious hours inside the station with a measuring wheel and a Canon FD 14L rectilinear lens (with 110 degree field-of-view) for key textures," he explained. (Before the BART police approached, that is, and shooed him out.)

As it happens, this was just a kind of 3D thumbnail imported into Second Life from a much larger project: he's recreated downtown Berkeley in 1:1 scale, on 40 OpenSim regions. Here's Dabney's video demo, presented at a UC Berkeley seminar. Read a lot more about it, and Darb Darbny's efforts to convert real world geospatial information into the metaverse, on his OpenSim blog. As he put in his presentation, "These [worlds] offer an engaging mirror of our world that can present GIS data with great fidelity and connect it in important ways with ordinary human experience." Though personally, I won't be totally satisfied with his mirror world Berkeley until I can walk a couple blocks from the virtual BART into virtual Long Life Vegi House. Second image credit: http://blog.simgis.com

Comments

[Ravishal Bentham]

Kudos for spelling "Geospatial" correctly!