To us virtual worlds only become seriously interesting (and seriously useful) once you could link them to the real world - and vice versa. This can be as simple as having an object in the virtual world which when touched can launch a web page in the users browser (in order to take an order, get feedback, or provide additional information for example), or it can be as complex as having virtual sensors detect movement and use it to control a a real-world art installation, or pick up real world web log data and display it in 3D within the world.
This linkage is nowadays mostly about "mash-ups" - using RSS, web services, AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to rapidly link the two worlds. This integration is one of our two specialist areas of virtual world development. It's also one of the reasons we really like Second Life - because it makes this type of integration relatively simpe to do (apart from memory limits, bandwidth limits, display limitations - but hey that's the sort of problem we're paid to deal with so you don't have to!)
Some of the systems that we have already developed include:
- Daden Navigator - the first proper web browser for SL
- Integrating Google Maps with Second Life
- A weather map that reads RSS weather feeds from Yahoo
- A globe that displays news stories from BBC and other RSS feeds, as well as displaying KML geographic information feeds intended for Google Earth
- A map that lets you place virtual pins in it, and then view the resultant collection of locations on Google Maps or Google Earth
- A virtual rabbit that detects users, greets them, and then sesnds a message to a real world WiFi rabbit (called a Nabaztag) to announce the visitor using speech in the real world
- A vistor tracking system that tracks a visitors movements through a virtual store, relays the data back to a web server, which generates an RSS feed from the data and then passes this to an AJAX application to display latest virtual visitor information on a web site
You can find details of these and others in the Experience and Knowledge parts of our web site.
If you want to know if we can integrate your data into virtual worlds just contact us to talk it through.
Oh, this "integrate" tag also applies to your in-world presence as well. Once you've built it you need to work at integrating your presence, and your brand, with the rest of the virtual world community.
