Today the group housed at Commonwealth Island launched the GeoGlobe, a tool meant to bring a Google Earth-like environment into Second Life. Hayduke Ebisu, Stephane Zugzwang and Corro Moseley worked together to create the GeoGlobe.

Structurally, the GeoGlobe is a huge box in SL space that has representations of the continents and oceans surrounding the user, who stands on a clear platform in the center. The GeoGlobe takes feeds (currently KML, GeoRSS and RSS) as input and displays them as geolocated prims onto the GeoGlobe. At present, this translates into news feeds from CNN, the BBC, the Indian Times, and an earthquake information source (U.S. Geological Survey, seismic data in KLM format) to retrieve headlines. These are then placed with colored prim dots onto the appropriate place in the world where the news is happening. Zooming in close to the dot will display the headline appropriate for that location. Clicking on a dot will bring up an appropriate URL that will connect with the story.

The RSS and KLM feeds are parsed, geocoding each item in the feed. For the news articles, the feeds are extracted based on city and country names given in the feed. The longitude and latitude are found for each feed, and represented as a spot on the map.

The GeoGlobe updates automatically every 30 minutes. Users can initiate an update sooner by pressing a button. “The 30 minutes... that’s an arbitrary setting, but we are limited in the number of updates that can happen by Linden Lab’s restrictions on data requests from the Internet,” Ebisu stated. “It is one of the serious shortcomings of Second Life right now. There are too many restrictions on data connections external to Second Life.”

The next addition to GeoGlobe will be the ability to “speak” a URL to a KML or RSS feed and see their data displayed.

Ebisu said “We believe this is the first implementation of dynamically geolocated information in Second Life. This is a 3-D geodata visualization tool. It is basically analogous to Google Earth, just at a global scale (for the moment).”

Although at present the GeoGlobe is used to display headlines and earthquake information, it has a broader scope of use. Educators will be able to use it to display information for their classes in a geographic context. A travel-related company might want to use it to show places around the world where they have special travel deals. Companies could use it to show where they have special travel deals. Activists could use it to highlight areas of the world they are concerned about.