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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Natick, MA-based Vivox said today that it’s opening its new “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” service to all Facebook members. The application—which allows Facebook users to set up free voice chat rooms and invite their friends to participate from within Facebook—is one of the first creations of Vivox Labs, a new R&D arm of the company, and had been in closed beta testing for the last few months. Vivox, which we profiled last month, is known mainly as a provider of voice communication services for massive virtual worlds and game worlds such as Second Life and Eve Online.

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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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Boston-based Hangout Industries, which runs the teen social virtual world Hangout.net, has extended its Series A financing round by $4 million, CEO Pano Anthos confirmed today after documents on the financing surfaced online yesterday. Highland Capital Partners and Polaris Venture Partners put up the funds, which bring the company’s total financing to $10 million, including a $1 million seed round and a $5 million first tranche in the Series A round. Hangout came out of stealth mode last September, and recently hired former Disney exec Mike Goslin and opened a West Coast office as part of an effort to focus the online property on entertainment, social interaction, and virtual goods sales.

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Dinner party conversations with Celia Francis don’t go down the usual paths. “When people ask ‘What do you do?” she says, “I have to say ‘I sell animated ferrets.’”

Francis is the Harvard- and MIT-educated CEO of WeeWorld, a transatlantic virtual goods company with its U.S. headquarters in Concord, MA, and its European headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland. The company is most famous for creating WeeMees, cartoonish avatars used by more than 27 million people around the world to personalize their identities for instant messaging tools and digital voice applications such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Skype. But its real business revolves around WeeWorld, an online virtual world where members, represented by their diminutive WeeMee avatars, can socialize, play casual games, and collect virtual items.

The company makes money by selling advertising space on the WeeWorld website and by selling virtual gear and the corporate sponsorships that go along with it—think Boston Celtics or LA Lakers jerseys for your WeeMee. I couldn’t find an actual animated ferret in the WeeWorld shopping mall, but I’m sure Francis could have one designed for you.

The virtual goods business “seems to be totally unaffected by the economy,” Francis says. In fact, Wal-Mart and Target would kill for WeeWorld’s sales statistics. Revenues from virtual goods have been growing at 15 percent per month throughout the recession, and advertising is “growing nicely” as well, she says. Part of that may be thanks to the relatively low prices of virtual goods: for the teens and twenty-somethings who are WeeWorld’s main users, $5 can buy quite a bit of bling. “It’s not a big spend compared to some other ways you can be entertained,” says Francis.

Venture funders apparently agree that WeeWorld is on to something. The startup has raised $21 million to date, with the most recent round of $15.5 million coming from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital in May 2006. But the company’s success isn’t blinding its 40-some staffers to the fundamental strangeness of their business. “The whole thing is amusing, and the company has had a sense of humor about it from the earliest days,” says Francis, whose own WeeMee wears an emerald-green suitjacket and clutches a light saber. “It’s a cheeky, fun, entertaining brand.”

For consumer brands trying to get their message to young people—who are spending less time watching television and more time online—virtual worlds are one promising platform. Whether it’s through full 3-D worlds like Second Life or Boston-based Hangout.net or “Sims”-style “2.5D” worlds like Habbo and WeeWorld, consumer-dependent organizations like clothing brands, sports teams, and musical groups are thrilled to have young people decorate their avatars and their spaces with branded goods. In fact, the organizers of the annual Virtual Worlds conference held each year in New York renamed their event the “Engage! Expo” to reflect the new emphasis on virtual worlds as marketing platforms.

WeeWorld’s philosophy of engagement is to make time spent in-world feel like play. “The people on WeeWorld are mostly teenagers, and they need a place to express themselves and evolve their identities as people,” Francis says. “This kind of thing didn’t exist when I was a teenager. You can come onto the site and every single day play with a different look or persona or interest. That kind of playfulness is so core to being a teenager—and that’s really what’s driving the virtual goods sales.”

Every day, Francis says, the company gets hundreds of requests from members for new virtual items that they’d like to buy. “Brands are a big part of it, which is why we’ve been really successful with advertisers,” Francis says. “Kids want to identify with certain brands that express who they are.”

And not just any brand: Francis says figuring out which virtual items will sell, and which will make members will turn up their noses, is “a total black art”—but one that the company has begun to master over time. “We’re experimenting with all kinds of different items, whether it’s furniture or accessories for your WeeMee,” she says. “We constantly tweak the …Next Page »

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UC San Diego says it has established a center for next-generation digital media with a gift from IBM (NYSE: IBM)—a high-performance IBM System z mainframe computer. In a statement, UCSD says IBM made the center possible through a shared university research award that includes the z mainframe, valued at about $2.2 million. The center, which will be housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, is dedicated to inventing the next generation of virtual worlds, multiple player online games, and high-fidelity digital cinema. UCSD says the center initially will focus on new production platforms for digital cinema through existing relationships with Hollywood studios.

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Hangout Industries, the Boston-based creator of the Web-based social virtual world Hangout.net, announced today that it has named Mike Goslin, former vice president of virtual world design and development for Disney Online, as its new vice president of product development. Goslin will be in charge of design, development and operations. “Mike is one of the most respected, effective and proven forces in the virtual worlds and games space,” Hangout CEO Pano Anthos said in a statement. “His combined talents as a natural story-teller, visionary and technologist make him the perfect candidate to bring Hangout to the forefront in the evolution of casual online entertainment.”

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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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Metaplace, the open-access virtual world that allows users to build and share their own animated communities, said today that it has collected $6.7 million in new financing, raising the startup’s funding total to $9.4 million.

The funding hails from four investors: existing backers Charles River Ventures and Crescendo Ventures, as well as new financiers Ben Horowitz and internet guru Marc Andreessen (best known for his role as Mosaic co-author and Netscape founder).

The San Diego-based company was started under the name Areae, Inc., by two Sony veterans who specialized in massively multiplayer games, Raph Koster and John Donham. Now officially known as Metaplace, the company has just begun invitation-only beta testing.

In a press release issued today, Koster says that the company’s aim is to create an open-platform space in which users can create a system of interlocking worlds, combining “the ubiquity and ease of the Web with the immersive and addictive nature of video games.”

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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 number-one customer complaint coming into Waltham, MA-based EveryScape, says CEO Jim Schoonmaker, is “Give us more.”

So far, EveryScape’s Web-based collection of pannable street-level photographs is limited to Boston and environs, New York, Miami, Laguna Beach, and four Colorado ski resorts—Aspen, Breckenridge, Snowmass Village, and Steamboat Springs. (Oh, there’s also Beijing, China—which is a strange and beautiful city, but not a place where many U.S. Web users are likely to need navigational advice.) For a company whose tagline is “The Real World, Online,” that’s what you call a start.

Schoonmaker acknowledges that EveryScape is “probably six months behind Google in the acquisition of content”— referring to the images behind the Street View feature of Google Maps, which covers 29 U.S. cities and counting.

Which is why the $7 million Series B financing round EveryScape announced today will come in very handy. “We need to get more content, put in more cities, and do it all faster,” says Schoonmaker. That will mean, among other things, making EveryScape’s server infrastructure easier to scale up, finding better ways to recruit and reward “Scape Artists” (outsiders who agree to contribute images and links), getting faster at creating the company’s distinctive interior tours of private properties, and generally bringing down the cost of content acquisition.

“If your ambition is to build the world, you can’t have even one expensive component,” says Schoonmaker. “Everything has to be scalable. That’s why we’ve had to think hard about how to shoot the public content, how to enable the private content to be shot and sold, how it’s all hosted on the portal, and how we can maintain it and make changes and update it over time. I think over time we’ve probably made as many mistakes as anyone else—but hopefully that just makes us a lot smarter.”

As we’ve noted in our previous pieces on EveryScape, the company’s patented “HyperMedia” technology weaves together photographs of contiguous locations using 3D graphic technology that makes browsing is database a far more immersive experience than what you’ll encounter with Google’s Street View service. But Google provides much wider coverage and, arguably, a friendlier interface.

Schoonmaker says improving EveryScape’s interface will be a major priority this year. The company has already bounced back from one misstep: its initial choice of Adobe’s Shockwave as its interactive-animation platform. “It was wonderful but no one would download it,” Schoonmaker says—so the company switched to the much more commonly installed Adobe Flash format. Now it needs to work on making its resources more discoverable and usable, says Schoonmaker. “For the vast majority of people out there, the idea of panning a picture is still not intuitive,” he says. “Pictures don’t move; movies do. So you’ve got to find a way for people to come to your site and understand immediately how to use it.”

Taking the lead in EveryScape’s financing round was Dace Ventures, a new Waltham, MA-based firm led by former CMGI president Dave Andonian that mainly invests in digital media, consumer marketing, and mobile services startups. (The firm’s portfolio also includes auctionPAL, CityVoter, LocaModa, Panraven, and Vitrue.) Also participating were existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic and LaunchPad Venture Group.

“Dace is consistently looking for the next wave of innovation in the Web 2.0 space coupled with passionate entrepreneurs that can bring cutting-edge technology to market,” Andonian said in EverySpace’s official announcement of the financing round. He said the company “has the potential to fundamentally change the way we explore cities, towns and businesses online by truly replicating the real world experience.”

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38 Studios, the Maynard, MA-based game development studio founded by Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, has decided not to reinvent the world. The virtual world, that is—the one it’s creating as part of the massively multiplayer online-gaming experience it plans to debut in late 2010. The company said yesterday it will license a suite of world-development tools and game servers from BigWorld Technology, which has offices in Canberra and Sydney, Australia. BigWorld supplies the technology behind online role-playing games such as Stargate Worlds.

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Sony Online Entertainment and New York-based Live Gamer (which we profiled in December) announced last week that Station Exchange, the system Sony launched in 2005 to give citizens of the online game world Everquest a “legal” way to auction off virtual currency, characters, and objects, will be shut down on March 27 and replaced four days later with Live Gamer’s new system for virtual-item trading. Live Gamer, which has venture backing from Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures and Kodiak Venture Partners, works with game publishers to offer sanctioned virtual trading environments designed to prevent fraud and discourage black-market or “off-grid” trading. Sony is one of its first major game-publishing partners.

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In a now-famous June 17 New York Times article entitled “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer,” technology writer Julian Dibbell detailed the surreal existence of workers in China who spend twelve hours a night scrambling for treasure inside the massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming environment World of Warcraft. The laborers collect virtual coins from the corpses of virtual creatures on behalf of other players, who don’t have time to rob graves for booty but are willing to pay real money on the “gray market” to buy the coins, which they need inside the game world to buy the virtual weapons and virtual armor required for killing monsters and winning more treasure. Some 100,000 people in China are employed in this way, Dibbell wrote, contributing to a global trade in virtual items estimated at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion per year.

In a sense, the existence of gold farming is a testament to the amazing success of MMOs, which have become a deadly serious hobby for millions of consumers, and of globalization itself, which, if nothing else, is a magnificent mechanism for transferring low-paying jobs to the people willing to do them. But it’s also a testament to a huge failure of imagination on the part of game publishers such as Blizzard Entertainment (the creator of the World of Warcraft series), who never realized that the various forms of scarcity built into the mechanics of their games would give rise to gold farming and other forms of unsanctioned, underground trading, and who have therefore been missing out on a potential slice of billions of dollars in transactions.

But wherever there is a massive, unregulated, disordered market for some good or service, there are entrepreneurs who smell an opportunity to make things more “efficient,” and a few of those entrepreneurs emerged from stealth mode this week in New York City. Live Gamer has been working with game publishers for nearly a year to build what co-founder and president Andrew Schneider calls a “an environment where end users can trade virtual goods in a safe, secure, transparent way, and publishers can participate as well.”

On December 17 the company announced that it has formed partnerships with several major MMO publishers and operators—including 10tacle Studios, Acclaim, Funcom, GoPets, Ping0, and Sony Online Entertainment—to include its virtual trading system in their games. The company also said that it has raised $24 million in venture funding from Charles River Ventures and Kodiak Venture Partners (both in Waltham, MA) and New York’s Pequot Ventures of New York.

“There is clearly consumer demand” for virtual items, Schneider told me today. “Publishers want to be proactive and bring a lot of the people who are being lost to the black market back onto the grid.” Live Gamer proposes to do that by creating marketplaces where players can buy and sell virtual items without leaving their game worlds. The marketplaces will be undergirded by e-commerce software that allows both highest-bidder auctions and buy-it-now sales, and that assures that buyers receive their goods and that sellers receive their payment.

For publishers, one obvious plus to providing legitimate marketplaces for virtual trading is that it will give them more control over in-game economies, which are distorted by gold farming and other activities outside the games’ terms of service. But such marketplaces could also give players an easier, safer way to pursue their in-game goals, which increasingly necessitate spending real money.

“The trading experience right now is bad,” says Schneider. “It’s out-of-game; you need to go to any number of different websites operating on the gray market; you need to put in your credit card and conduct payment to people you don’t know; there is a high risk for fraud—that the item or currency or virtual asset you purchase will not be delivered. We can get rid of all of those inefficiencies and provide a seamless, integrated, instantaneous trading experience.”

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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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The race is on to create an immersive, photorealistic online model of the real world. Such an environment could ultimately serve not just as navigation tool or a kind of 3-D yellow pages, but as a canvas for an endless variety of advertising, business intelligence, scientific and environmental data, and user-generated content such as photographs, podcasts, and reviews. But the big, obvious contestants who are pouring scores of programmers and millions of dollars into that race—Google and Microsoft—may suddenly find they’ve been overtaken by a small Waltham, MA-based company, EveryScape, which today launched a service it calls “the real world online.”

In the four cities covered so far—Boston, New York, Miami, and Aspen—EveryScape allows users to pick any location on a street map and explore a 360-degree, panoramic photograph taken at that spot. Locations of interest are marked in the photographs by clickable signpost icons that bring up boxes with additional information. Bright-orange arrow icons indicate that additional views are available in the directions of the arrows—typically, up and down a street. When the user clicks one of these arrows, a proprietary algorithm identifies buildings and other shapes in the photographs as 3-D objects and creates a brief, 3-D animation, moving the camera more or less smoothly from the current location to the next. In two of the pilot cities, Miami and Aspen, the user can even steer the camera inside buildings or across the grounds of large resort properties.

The animation algorithm is a clever trick that produces the impression that EveryScape’s world is three-dimensional and fully navigable, in the mode of virtual worlds like Second Life. In fact, EveryScape’s database is just a collection of still images captured by drivers who criss-crossed their cities carrying car-mounted digital cameras with spherical lenses.

“The whole point of EveryScape is to try to bridge the gap between just taking photos and building a global-scale, highly detailed 3-D model of the environment, which is a decade away or more,” says Mok Oh, the company’s founder and chief technology officer. “We really feel like this solution makes sense.”

The idea of stitching together street views into a walkable, street-level city atlas isn’t new. The first illustrated directories of city streets were actually created more than a century ago; the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, for example, includes a remarkable illustrated guide to the streets of San Francisco, circa 1895. A more modern example, and one that at first glance bears a strong resemblance to EveryScape, is Google Maps’ Street View feature, which allows users to pan and zoom around 360-degree photographs taken from locations along the streets of 15 U.S. cities. Microsoft is also in on the game, offering a preview of a street-view feature that puts the viewer in the seat of a mock racecar or sports car.

But EveryScape’s service leapfrogs the other companies’ work in several ways. For one thing, EveryScape’s views are much brighter and sharper than Google’s. That’s because they’re based on high-resolution photographs taken using digital SLRs, whereas Google’s street views are captured by video cameras, which can’t record as many pixels. EveryScape’s animations create a sense of real movement between locations, while Google simply fades from one image to the next. And in a few places in Miami and Aspen, EveryScape’s driver-photographers became pedestrians, entering buildings such as the Arts Center of South Florida. For these spots, the street maps in EveryScape map panel are supplanted by detailed floor plans, and the user can enter specific rooms. (In one room in the Arts Center, you can peer over the shoulder of a pony-tailed artist working on a painting. Check out a YouTube video on the whole technology here.)

Many more “explorable” buildings are coming, according to Everyscape CEO Jim Schoonmaker. In fact, interior views are at the core of EveryScape’s business model. The company sells these views to retailers and property owners as, in effect, giant walk-through advertisements. The Bentley Hotel on Ocean Drive in Miami, for example, commissioned EveryScape to create images throughout the hotel and grounds, including three actual suites. The photos give potential guests the chance to make a “virtual visit” to the hotel before reserving a room. (For these interiors, EveryScape goes to extra lengths to make the 3-D transitions look convincing. I’m an old virtual-worlds hand, and I was surprised by how effectively the technique creates a sense of immersion, even though the panoramic photos themselves are static.)

EveryScape’s team in Waltham is working hard to sell interior views of more properties and to bring more cities online. “Much of what we’ve learned about building the world online has been learned from how the real world was built,” says Schoonmaker. “Phase One of our world-building process is what we call paving the roads—just creating the basic street views. Right now, it’s primarily the public spaces that are available for viewing in Boston and New York. But once the road is paved, businesses and people start showing up. So Phase Two will be attaching content from businesses.”

But Schoonmaker and Oh are smart enough to realize that they can’t build an entire world on their own. So EveryScape—a private company with Series A backing of “less than $10 million” (the company says) from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson New England, Draper Atlantic, and Launchpad Venture Group—is also inviting ordinary users to contribute to the site as “Scape Artists,” uploading their own photographs and annotating specific locations with information, reviews, and links to existing Web pages. The company is recruiting several levels of Scape Artists; those with the necessary equipment will be paid to drive around their own cities and help “pave the roads,” to use Schoonmaker’s phrase.

“We think of this as a canvas,” says Schoonmaker. “The photographic content in itself is very powerful and useful, but it becomes exponentially more powerful when you use it as a context for information that’s already on the Internet. It’s a universal platform for embedding information about real-world places.”

EveryScape went live this morning at www.everyscape.com. I can’t direct you to an Everyscape panorama of Xconomy’s address at 10 Rogers Street, Cambridge, since EveryScape’s Boston-area photographers haven’t yet crossed the Charles River. But I expect to see one of their cars tooling down our street soon. Maybe we’ll even invite them inside for tea.

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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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