Google Launches Tool for Building in Virtual World

Posted on May 12, 2006

You might have heard of Second Life, the popular gaming virtual world that recently raised $11 million. But game companies aren't the only Internet corporations building virtual worlds.

Business 2.0 reports that Google has released tools that allow people to build on its popular Google Earth service.

Google already has Google Earth, a 3-D mockup of the planet generated from satellite photos. But Google wants you to do more than just zoom through its virtual Earth. The company wants you to add on to it, too.
At the end of April the company released, for free, a popular 3-D modeling program it bought called SketchUp. Google is encouraging developers to use SketchUp to build 3-D layers on top of Google Earth. There's even a website Google provides called 3-D Warehouse, where you can demonstrate what you've built in Sketch Up.

Business 2.0 compares the idea to the metaverse in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash.

The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What's a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. The metaverse was Stephenson's name for a virtual world where his characters play and do business. It was a black ball 1.6 times the size of Earth, with a giant street running around its equator.

Second Life has a huge lead over any company that might create a new virtual world, including Google. In March, Second Life claimed a $6.5 million internal economy. Google's SketchUp software comes in both a free and a pro version.