When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that …Next Page »

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If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009’s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

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When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to …Next Page »

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For a long time, Second Life was stuck in the cyber equivalent of the silent-movie era: people communicated by typing, and their words showed up in little thought bubbles above their avatars’ heads. All of that changed drastically around 2007, when Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, hired an obscure outfit called Vivox to equip its 3-D virtual world with a voice communication system. Now any Second Life citizen who has a headset connected to their computer can simply speak, and everyone whose avatar is standing nearby will hear them in living stereo.

For the Gloria Swansons of Second Life, like myself, the changeover from typing to talking was a bit traumatic—and indeed, 20 percent of Second Life citizens still abstain from voice communication. But the other 80 percent gab for a billion minutes every month, which is a rather convincing demonstration that most people inside 3-D computer environments prefer talking to texting.

And now Vivox, a four-year-old startup based in Natick, MA, is about to introduce its technology to three new communities that could vastly increase its user base. The company announced this morning that it has formed a partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS), the world’s largest entertainment software company, to add its voice services to several online EA games. First up is Command & Conquer 4, a continuation of EA’s hugely popular real-time strategy game that’s expected to launch early next year.

At the same time, Vivox is announcing the launch of Vivox Labs, an incubator-within-a-startup where the company is trying out different ways of delivering its voice services over the Web. And the first two Vivox Labs experiments are aimed at big targets: Facebook, where the lab’s “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” application will allow members to invite their friends to instant Web voice conferences; and World of Warcraft subscribers, who will be able to use a new Vivox-powered website called Puggable to assemble teams of players for in-world campaigns. Both the Facebook and Puggable applications are in private beta testing and are expected to go public by January.

“We started the company about four years ago with the goal of making voice a seamless, natural part of every online experience,” Vivox co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver told me when I visited the company last week. “Our view at the time was that more and more human interaction would take place online, and the richest form of communication we have is talking to each other. So we thought there would be an opportunity to turn the Web from this silent, barren place into one filled with the warm sounds of human voices.”

That’s exactly what could happen if even more gaming, virtual-world, and social networking communities turn to Vivox’s services. Not bad for a company that started out as a wacky idea from Jeff Pulver, the founder of the company that became Internet phone service provider Vonage.

You’ve probably heard of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP; it’s the technology behind Vonage and Skype, and the one that has turned the telecom industry upside down by transforming phone calls into digital data packets and routing them over the open Internet. Vivox’s system works on similar principles, except that …Next Page »

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Allegedly, surfing the Web is a leisure activity for a growing number of people. I wouldn’t know—my job as a technology blogger obliges me to surf the Web all day at work, so if I have to use the Web from home, it’s usually because I’m taking care of some task like paying bills, uploading photos, or getting driving directions. But for people who do use the Web as a hangout, there are more and more ways to make it a social experience. And one company, Hamburg, Germany-based Weblin, is optimistic enough about the future of its animated chat service—which gives surfers inch-tall avatars that can communicate directly with the avatars of other Weblin members visiting the same Web pages—that it has expanded to the United States, starting with an office outside Boston.

If you belonged to Weblin (I’m guessing the name is a combination of “Web” and “gremlin”) and you had downloaded the company’s Windows-based plugin, your customized avatar or small-w weblin would be standing on the status bar at the bottom of this browser window right now. If another Weblin member happened to be reading this Xconomy article at the same time, their weblin would also appear. You could then chat, joke, or flirt with that person via text balloons that show up above your weblin, the same way avatars communicate in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You can even make your weblin smile, wave, dance, or run. So what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did for horrible B-movies and what Lycos Cinema is doing for online video, Weblin does for the entire Web (although in practice, you’ll only run into other weblins at a small fraction of websites, since there are only about 10,000 to 100,000 Weblin users online at any given time).

“Even with social networking, the Web is not a social place; a typical website doesn’t allow you to chat with other visitors,” says Jan Andresen, Weblin’s co-founder and CEO, who’s based in Hamburg but was traveling on the East Coast when I reached him by phone last week. Yes, Andresen acknowledges, you can leave a text comment at your friend’s blog or their Facebook Super-Wall. But that’s like deciding you’re only going to communicate with your family by leaving sticky notes on the fridge, he says. “Why not interact instantly with other people, make jokes, and see their reactions? It’s so much more normal.”

Well, “normal” if you don’t mind a bunch of cartoon characters sauntering around your Web browser. And the 20- to 35-year-old users who are Weblin’s main target audience probably don’t. (Indeed, the system still bears the stamp of the virtual-classroom application, developed by CTO and co-founder Heiner Wolf, on which it’s based.) But for older or more mission-oriented Web users like me, Andresen agrees, a crowd of weblins might be a distraction. “If you have to book a flight or finish your spreadsheet, you don’t do it in a pub,” he says. “But maybe you’re at home, you’re bored, you have a glass of wine next to you, and you just want to be entertained. We call that moment ‘chilling.’ For that time, Weblin is ideal.”

Andresen and Wolf launched Weblin in 2006 and have raised $1.3 million in funding from a combination of private investors and the High Tech Grunderfonds, a public-private initiative that invests in early-stage technology startups in Germany. The startup’s technology is built atop XMPP, an open-source instant messaging platform formerly known as Jabber. Andresen says that Weblin hit the 1-million-member mark in September, and that about 10,000 people are downloading the Windows plugin every day. (There’s also a purely browser-based version of the system called “Weblin Lite” that works on Mac and Linux computers, but it assigns you a random avatar that does not persist as you travel from Web page to Web page.)

The company hopes to make money in two ways. The first, more predictable revenue stream will come from selling ads, which will pop up in the same transparent layer over the browser window that the weblins themselves inhabit. But while that may sound like another annoying distraction, Andresen says …Next Page »

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A Boston startup transposing MySpace-style teen social networking into a 3-D virtual environment is one of the companies making its public debut at this week’s TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. Executives from Hangout Industries, which has raised $6 million in venture funding from Polaris Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, went onstage at the conference today to demonstrate their service, Hangout.net, where each user receives a free, private virtual room that can be outfitted with virtual objects bearing real-world brands, such as Skullcandy headphones and Monster Energy drinks.

Hangout is currently in private beta testing, and expects to open to the general public later this fall, according to CEO Pano Anthos. As the name of the service suggests, the rooms are intended to function as impromptu meeting places for young people in the 16-24 age group. Members buy decorations for their spaces using a virtual currency, and designate friends not by linking to their profiles but by handing out the “keys” to their rooms (i.e., permission to enter).

These hangouts aren’t just static spaces—they’re virtual media rooms, with embedded players that link to content from the Web, such as Facebook photo albums, YouTube videos, and songs from music search engine SeeqPod. “On Hangout, teens interact with their friends as they do in the offline world—whether it be watching favorite videos on YouTube, listening to music, sharing Facebook photos, engaging with popular brands and products that they love, playing games or making music, or just chatting ‘in person’,” in the words of a company announcement released today.

While Hangout.net might sound similar on the surface to other online virtual worlds such as Second Life, There, and Google’s widely panned Lively, Anthos argues that it’s very different in scope and intent. “The model is not a world where you go out and explore,” he told Xconomy last week. “It’s about creating your space, expressing who you are physically through the kinds of objects and activities that surround your room, and engaging with your friends.”

It’s also about advertising through branded merchandise. And in that respect as well, Hangout.net is much more similar to MySpace—which offers members a range of brand-driven materials, including badges, background images, songs, videos, with which to personalize their profiles—than it is to other virtual worlds, which typically generate revenue through subscription fees. “Kids hate banner ads—they ignore them,” says Anthos. “Cool brands really love this idea of ‘emergent exposure’….Advertisers can’t wait to put their products in. But at the same time we’re careful to let the kids be the shoppers. This is entirely about an opt-in model where you decide what products, services, and media you want in your space.” For example, members can decorate their walls with a selection of posters from Art.com and Allposters.com, and dress their avatars in T-shirts based on designs from Threadless, a hip online clothes store.

But while all the marketing and branding going on inside Hangout may be reminiscent of MySpace, the new service has one big advantage over its 2-D predecessor: …Next Page »

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One of my goals with this column—which is now in its third week—is to tell you about new stuff on the Web that’s so delicious you just have to taste it. Here are three morsels to tide you over until next time.

The first is a quick appetizer: Very Short List, an e-mail newsletter funded by IAC/Interactive Corp. VSL has been around since mid-2006, but I just discovered a couple of weeks ago. If you sign up, every day they’ll send you one—exactly one—nugget of entertainment or media content that, in the site’s words, hasn’t already been hyped to within an inch of its life. So far, every item I’ve received has been intriguing at least (an amazing TV ad for a soccer video game), and often utterly engrossing (an online museum of online museums).

For the main course: I suggest Google Earth 4.3. This week Google rolled out the latest version of its free geographic browser for Windows and Mac, which lets you tour a 3-D simulation of the entire planet built on the company’s database of real satellite and aerial photographs.

Like its competitors, Microsoft Virtual Earth and NASA’s Worldwind, Google Earth started out as a digital atlas, showing huge amounts of classical map and photographic data that was itself 2-D but happened to be draped over a spherical globe, which mainly made it easier to shift between top-down views of different locations. As the product has evolved, however, the sphere forming the scaffolding for the map data has gained realistic 3-D topography, followed by other real-world touches such as 3-D buildings and even clouds based on real-time reports from the National Weather Service. In other words, it’s gradually becoming what Yale computer scientist David Gelernter first termed a “mirror world”—a software model that tries to recreate the human environment as accurately as possible.

The latest version provides improvements in both content and navigation that nudge it even farther in this direction—which is a blessing for people like me who are intrigued by virtual worlds and all the possibilities they offer for new kinds of learning and interaction (though it should be noted that some traditional map mavens like Stefan Geens, the author of the Ogle Earth blog, feel that the profusion of cosmetic improvements in Google Earth is diminishing its information value as an atlas).

The most visible addition to Google Earth 4.3 is an expanded crop of 3-D buildings for dozens of cities around the world, along with extremely realistic textures or “skins” for those buildings. In past versions of Google Earth, most 3-D buildings were represented by gray boxes of the appropriate shape and height. In 4.3, most of the 3-D models, including hundreds of Boston buildings, are now clothed with photographs of the actual structures. (Don’t ask me how Google pulled this off: The process of creating photorealistic 3-D models of buildings was, until recently, a tedious one tackled mainly by enthusiastic amateurs, who used Google’s SketchUp 3-D modeling program and uploaded their finished models to Google’s open-source 3-D Warehouse. Clearly Google has found a way to automate the whole process.)

The program’s 3-D buildings are now so detailed that it’s possible to “fly” to a given location in the Google Earth landscape and get a view that’s astonishingly close to actually being there. To see what I mean, compare the two images here: one is a photograph I took yesterday from the roof of the building in Cambridge, MA, where Xconomy is headquartered. The other is a screenshot from Google Earth with the imaginary “camera” positioned in roughly the same spot.

When comparing these two images, keep in mind what makes the Google Earth version so remarkable: It’s entirely synthetic. No one from Google went out and took a picture from that perspective (although Google’s vast collection of Street View photographs is now integrated into Google Earth—but that’s a different story). Rather, it’s a reconstructed view based entirely on 3-D modeling, pasted-on photographic skins, Google’s map data, and some very sophisticated computer graphics algorithms.

Google Earth 4.3 contains a ton of other great improvements, but I’ll just mention two more. One is the sun. Now you can turn on a feature that puts a simulated sun into the proper spot in the simulated sky and lets you adjust the time of day with a slider, generating realistic shadows on buildings and landforms. Finally, the Google Earth team has completely revamped the program’s navigation controls to make panning, zooming, tilting, and otherwise moving around inside the 3-D environment much more intuitive—which is to say, much more like a videogame or a Second Life-style virtual world. If you’re a longtime user of Google Earth, the new controls might take some getting used to, but ultimately you’ll appreciate the added flexibility. Meanwhile, if you’ve never downloaded Google Earth before, there’s never been a better time to start exploring.

And now for dessert: Go check out MyLOC, the newest online resource from the Library of Congress. Launched April 12, the site is a history buff’s dream, containing a digital collection of historic books, maps, and other resources from the Library’s vast archives. The site—the online counterpart of an exhibit at the Library’s Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C.—provides some clever Flash and Microsoft Silverlight multimedia tools for browsing individual books, including a Gutenberg Bible and several volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. Bon appetit.

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The “Cyber Monday” phenomenon is a baseless piece of marketing fluff crafted by the National Retail Federation—the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season actually falls somewhere between December 5 and 15 every year. But if virtual shopping floats your boat, today is a good day for it anyway: the novelty retailer Brookstone, based in Merrimack, NH, has chosen Cyber Monday to open its first 3-D online store using technology created by Marlborough, MA, startup Kinset.

If you’ve ever visited the virtual worlds Second Life or There, you’ll feel right at home inside the virtual Brookstone store. It’s a rough 3-D mockup of a real Brookstone retail outlet, fully stocked with the chain’s trademark so-cool-you-gotta-have-one gadgets, like the $70 iHome Shower Dock for your iPod or $30 White Microbeam keychain flashlight. You can saunter through the store using your computer’s mouse or arrow keys. If you see something you like, you can zoom in on it, pull up a text window for more information, and then add it to your shopping cart, just as if you were shopping at Amazon. (In fact, when you’re done, Kinset’s software sends you to Amazon to complete the purchase, which is then fulfilled by Brookstone.)

The Brookstone store is one of three adjacent stores inside Kinset’s 3-D shopping world, which was launched in beta form on October 22 and is accessible via a small Windows program that you download to your PC. Brookstone was attracted to Kinset’s 3-D retailing platform because it makes online shopping into “a deeper, more robust and interactive journey of discovery,” akin to visiting a bricks-and-mortar store, said vice president and general manager of direct marketing Greg Sweeney in a statement about the opening.

That may be taking things a bit far. My own visit to the virtual Brookstone store—and to the demonstration bookstore and electronics store Kinset has built next door to it—didn’t feel terribly deep. It could be that I’m jaded, having spent more hours than I care to admit exploring Second Life and building virtual objects using that world’s extensive modeling tools. But I’d say that Kinset’s Brookstone store is a first, tentative step toward retailing’s 3-D future—a serviceable but not-fully-baked melding of 3-D modeling and navigation techniques with older e-commerce tools.

For one thing, Kinset’s default mechanism for moving around—using the mouse to jump from point to point—is awkward and disorienting; you really have to turn it off and use the arrow keys to understand where you’re going. And in the biggest departure from the Second Life model, you don’t have a personal avatar in Kinset’s world—the screen simply shows the first-person point of view from where your avatar would be standing, if you had one. That’s an understandable technical choice, since you don’t really need an elaborate Second-Life-style avatar to go on a shopping expedition. But the main benefit of an avatar is to orient you inside a virtual space, and without one I felt somewhat lost and, er, disembodied.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Brookstone store doesn’t contain any Brookstone gadgets—it’s a room full of boxes with photographs of the products pasted to the outsides. If you’ve been to Second Life, you know that it’s possible to build exquisitely detailed 3-D replicas of objects as small as flowers and teapots. That, frankly, is what I was expecting to see inside Kinset’s Brookstone store—not stacks of cubes covered with flat, 2-D pictures that I could just as easily have found in a Brookstone catalog or at the Brookstone website.

Even without avatars and detailed 3-D objects, however, there is still value to the concept of arranging products in a three-dimensional space. For example, spreading products out the way they’re arranged in a real store and allowing the shopper to walk down virtual aisles makes browsing—and serendipitous discoveries—much easier and more natural than on a traditional e-retailing site.

There are other advantages as well. I wasn’t able to speak with Kinset executives for this story, but the company’s FAQ points out that many well-known retail chains—think Best Buy, for example—have spent lots of money honing the look and layout of their physical stores. Kinset’s tools make it easy to re-create the experience of being inside one of those stores more faithfully than any flat website could hope to do. The Web, as Kinset’s FAQ puts it, “introduced an alien visual vocabulary to merchandising;” Kinset’s 3-D spaces restore the more familiar vocabulary of bricks-and-mortar stores.

At the same time, transposing retailing to virtual worlds allows new kinds of interactions that aren’t possible in the physical world. Without having to leaving home, for example, shoppers in Kinset’s world can ask questions of virtual clerks. In the future, they’ll be able to rendezvous inside the world with friends who are also connected from their home computers, or attach notes for their friends to specific items.

I’ve talked with lots of people about the evolution of virtual worlds, which range today from social worlds like Second Life to gaming worlds like World of Warcraft and practical map-based worlds like Google Earth. It’s not clear whether there’s a demand for a dedicated Shopping World, or whether retailing will simply be a component of other types of worlds—but all of the experts agree that social shopping experiences will be one of the 3-D universe’s key pastimes and moneymakers. Providing the infrastructure to make that happen is where Kinset is carving out a lead. “If, in the future, you find a store via Google Earth, that’s fine,” the company’s FAQ. “When you want to go inside that virtual store and buy things, we will be about rendering the inside experience.”

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Note to self: Next time you give a keynote speech in Second Life, tickle your avatar every once in a while to keep it awake.

I was slightly embarrassed yesterday at Life 2.0, a virtual conference organized inside the virtual world Second Life by multimedia publisher CMP, when I realized that I’d been lecturing for 10 or 15 minutes but my avatar was slumped over the podium like a narcoleptic. It’s one of the unintentionally hilarious features of Second Life that when a user is “afk” or away from the keyboard for more than about 10 minutes, their avatar falls asleep. I wasn’t technically afk, but I was gabbing away over an audio link without remembering to nudge my avatar.

Hopefully, my disrespectful posture didn’t sour the hundred or so people in the audience on my speech, which was about the current-day technologies giving rise to the “Metaverse.” That term is a product of the cyberpunk fiction of Neal Stephenson, but it’s being used today to connote the sum product (and the future shape) of immersive 3-D computer environments as diverse as Second Life, Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and World of Warcraft. I basically spent the first third of 2007 writing a massive cover story about the Metaverse for MIT’s Technology Review magazine—a story that, I’m pleased to say, a lot of people have ended up pointing to as a useful, centralized explanation of the current moment in the evolution of virtual-worlds technology. A few weeks ago John Jainschigg, the director of online technology and new business for the CMP Metaverse division of publishing giant CMP, invited me to give a talk about the article as the opening session for the fall Life 2.0, a quarterly event that attracts software developers and businesspeople interested in using Second Life and other immersive environments to engage with customers. Despite a few qualms about being able to translate the article into a decent talk, I accepted, and yesterday I was forced to make good on my commitment.

I mainly repeated the argument from my article that anyone who has spent time in both Google Earth (the most popular map world or “geobrowser”) and Second Life (the leading social virtual world, created and operated by San Francisco-based Linden Lab) should appreciate how powerful it would be to mash up the two technologies, or at least the driving ideas behind them. Wandering around Second Life demonstrates how natural it can be to build and explore 3-D structures and environments through the medium of a human-shaped, human-acting avatar. Browsing Google Earth demonstrates what a sense of freedom and mastery comes from having tip-of-your-fingers access to an entire globe’s worth of geographical data at multiple levels of resolution.

The next step—either bringing avatars into map worlds, or making social virtual worlds more map-like—is so obvious that someone will figure out how to do it, whether or not there’s money in it. And from there, it’s not too many more steps to a full Metaverse—a 24/7 immersive simulation of the real world, as ubiquitous and accessible as the Web and used for everything from recreation and virtual tourism to city management, logistics and supply chain management, military training, environmental monitoring.

I wasn’t arguing in my piece that privately controlled platforms like Google Earth and Second Life themselves will become the cornerstones of the Metaverse (although several rudimentary attempts are underway to make avatars work in Google Earth and to make giant maps work in Second Life, as I detailed in my article). Rather, I think these two programs are serving as testbeds and training grounds for the developers who will soon go out and build a new Metaverse infrastructure that’s much more Web-like (in the sense that it will be based on open standards, so that anyone can add to it).

That’s not to say that Google and Linden Lab won’t be there as participants. Linden Lab, where the programmers and executives are smart enough to know they can’t build the Metaverse on their own, has already released an open source version of its client viewer program and says it will eventually contribute the underlying simulation software to the open source community. And Google recently contributed KML, the formatting language that allows users to create data overlays in Google Earth, to the Open Geospatial Consortium for consideration as an industry-wide, open source geographical markup standard.

After I shut up, audience members posed several nice questions, such as (my paraphrases): “What business models will drive the Metaverse?” “Will there be wide enough access to the broadband Internet to make the Metaverse work for everyone?” “What critical mass of participation must be reached before Metaverse construction really takes off?” I won’t bore you by recounting my answers. But as at any well-run technology event (which—hats off to John Jainschigg—this one definitely was), there were far too many good questions at the end and too little time to talk about them.

I made sure to plug Xconomy and to tell people what we’re doing here to analyze, and hopefully cultivate, the innovation scene in greater Boston. In that connection, it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Google both have growing presences in Boston, and that several Boston-area companies are working on various aspects of the Metaverse, including the Cambridge outpost of Linden Lab, Quincy game studio 2K Boston, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s MMORPG development house 38 Studios, and stealth-mode social-virtual-world developer Conduit Labs. There’s also a project underway at Emerson College to create a virtual version of Boston, or at least its major landmarks, inside Second Life.

Life 2.0, which is being sponsored by Sun Microsystems and IBM, continues until September 21. You can register for free here to attend the remainder of the conference. I’m told that a videotape of my keynote and other sessions will be available at some point in the future.

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If you’ve spent any time in Second Life—or any other virtual world, for that matter—you know that the serious attractions are on the ground, not in the sky. The sky simply isn’t a priority for most virtual world-builders, who usually have their hands full just simulating players’ avatars and their interactions with virtual objects such as buildings and furniture. The synthetic cumulus clouds of Second Life look like raked-over cotton candy, the sunsets are a wan burnt-orange, and there’s nary a thunderhead, rainbow, or sunbeam to be found.

But Second Life’s weather is about to improve. Linden Lab, the company that launched Second Life in 2003, purchased Waltham-based graphics studio Windward Mark Interactive in May, and will soon integrate that firm’s atmospheric rendering software into its 24/7 online simulation, bringing the sky a new level of realism and spectacle. At the same time, Windward Mark’s five founding programmers—all members of Harvard College’s Class of 2003—are moving into Linden Lab’s new 14th-floor offices at One Broadway, Cambridge.

This Kendall Square location is Linden Lab’s largest major outpost outside its San Francisco office. That means it won’t just be the lead site testing the new weather-modeling system (called WindLight)—it will also be the place where the famed virtual-worlds company explores whether it can, itself, operate virtually. “We see Second Life as a global platform, so we should be a distributed company,” says John Lester, Linden Lab’s Boston operations director and academic programs manager.

I sat down with Lester last week in one of the conference rooms that Linden Lab shares with the dozens of other technology companies renting bays in One Broadway’s busy Cambridge Innovation Center. The view out the windows was of just the sort of breezy, drizzly Boston day that the Windward Mark guys would probably enjoy simulating.

“The sky is never just a static picture,” Lester observes. “The atmosphere is always changing, and causing you to see what’s underneath differently. We want to give our users that kind of control in Second Life. And with WindLight you can change the level of haze, the types of clouds, the rate of the wind. That’s why it was such an effective match to hire these five guys from Windward Mark, who are just brilliant.”

Not long ago, these virtuosos of variation might have been asked to move across the country to work out of the Sansome Street headquarters of Linden Lab—a famously cultish company run by CEO Phillip Rosedale, who frequently proselytizes on the virtues of virtual communities. But Lester, who wears an amulet showing the signature raised-hand Linden Lab logo around his neck, says it’s now time for the company to welcome employees who might prefer to live outside the Bay Area. “We talk the talk about the Metaverse, and being plugged into a global data-space,” says Lester. “Now we want to walk the walk. Instead of all being in the same building in San Francisco, we’ll see the world from more points of view, and we’ll live where we want to live.”

Lester himself is a longtime Bostonian, having joined Linden Lab after a long stint as director of technology for the neurology service at Massachusetts General Hospital. “At MGH I got into how technology could help physicians and patients communicate, particularly patients with chronic incurable illnesses,” Lester recounts. He says he saw the potential for educational and social uses of virtual worlds after watching stroke survivors and people with Asperger’s Syndrome and cerebral palsy begin to flower through their interactions in Second Life. “I decided I saw so much potential for this that I wanted to help make it grow.”

In the Cambridge office, Lester and the Windward Mark programmers will work alongside a representative cross-section of other Linden Lab staffers, including software developers, community managers, business development officers–”the whole nine yards,” in Lester’s words. The weather-simulation experts may even have to get their hands dirty helping to improve the stability of Second Life’s basic simulation software—which, at times, is barely up to the challenge of supporting the tens of thousands of users who are online simultaneously. Just this week, residents have suffered through a series of outages related to a bug in the way Second Life’s simulation servers communicate with the databases that store all information about the world’s contents.

Improvements can’t come too soon for some users, who’d rather have working avatars than beautiful weather. “You need to slow down the development of WindLight, and get some of the people working on that moved onto the problems,” one Second Life user urged last week in a comment on the company’s blog. “Once the asset server does exactly what it’s supposed to 99.99% of the time, then we can talk about pretty skies.”

Like the Cambridge office, the company’s other locations in Seattle, WA, Mountain View, CA, and Brighton, England will have a broad mix of employees working on a range of such challenges—often meeting one another inside the virtual world. “The offices aren’t branches, they are just distributed instances of a single Linden Lab,” says Lester. “Our only central office is Second Life itself.”

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