Friday, August 24, 2007

Project started : GIS with Flex 3D in game industry and social networks

While developing the 3D environment for GIS in Adobe Flex (www.gis3dflex.blogspot.com), I mentioned several times about some other fields that this solution could be interfering with. While I was studying at the University, during my breaks I used to play a very simple geographical game (www.geosense.net). Now this game can be addictive believe me, but the only hangover I get after playing this game... is knowledge about world. Now this game is not so popular because of lack of proper marketing and poor graphics (although it has many visitors), but can you imagine if companies like Google or ESRI would install such an option in their web-based products? With the superb user interface and variety of data they posses... This would attract plenty of new users most probably. The reason is simple – the mixture of education and relaxing game (the relaxing “waste of time” is justified by the user because it is in big percentage educational application as well). Multiplayer games can be even more addictive. Again, geosense gives us ability to compete with other users, competition based on actual, useful geographical knowledge. In geosense we can compete only with one player at once, but imagine system like Google Maps and 20 people competing against each other online... Let’s say using the knowledge about lakes and rivers spread all over the world. The element of multiplayer competition is very important if you look at gaming industry and especially at solutions like Blizzards World of Warcraft, this is actually what keeps those games on the top. Now this is just a simple example to show you that this idea would work, everyone would find something interesting for them (you could be using data for wine regions or history events for example). The thing worth noticing here is also that systems like ArcWeb Explorer or Google Maps have already interfaces that could be used for such a type of online entertainment. Ok, but those are ideas that actually Google or ESRI could use. My imagination with GIS based gaming goes a bit further.

We all know how social networks like Facebook work, how they gather people, and how people create content on their own. These days it is so important like an e-mail client or a messenger and plays a great role in creating & showing our own personality as well as meeting new people. This is huge amount of information that can be connected with spatial data that GIS provides. In the most general words : I believe that spatial data based social network can be a great extension to Web 2.0 social networks, or be build on top of them. This kind of data is already in use in social networks you say... showing your location using Google Maps from web service for instance is a very popular feature. But probably as you can expect I have in my mind using 3D worlds to create actually virtual cities, where people could walk and interact with each other, kind of multiplayer game. Now that kind of solution based on true geographical data achieved from GIS systems, and personal data from social networks could be a great step to ‘Matrix like’ world. Let me visualize this for you. Let’s say you come from a town named “coffeebag”. You go to the main web page of spatial data based social network. You type the name of your town “coffeebag” and the 3D environment based on that town is loaded for you (Adobe Flex swf with our GIS 3D world representation – see my latter blog). Now, you go around the city and the information about people from... let’s say facebook for city of “coffeebag” is loaded to the 3D environment so that it corresponds to the exact “lives in” field they provided in social network. So while going around the city you will see who is living across the street or what kind of shops are in the corner. The information from the social network could be displayed when you approach the door. Let’s go further, why not to meet on the street with other person that is wandering around? Why not to chat with him or do a video conference? Now, this I believe can be done using Flex messaging system which gives us ability to share information (messages or position in the world) among all the clients that are connected to the server. Remember that strict geographical building data is not the only data type that we can get from professional GIS. You could see if a person that you are talking with in 3D world is living in the area that has big crime rate for instance. Now this actually starts looking like a live game and starts interfering with many other fields again (like online surveying or observing people behavior). And as you know people like watching reality from virtual perspective, this is a factor that social networks are build on, a new way they can express themselves and more people they can reach.

In this project blog I will try to develop GIS based multiplayer online world using idea from my last blog to represent 3D GIS environment in Flex. I will connect it with Flex messaging system to achieve 3D game like look (FPP). Then we could see how practical connection with social networks could look like. I will also try to show some other ideas connected in wider perspective in something that I call Geographically Aided Game (GAG) or Spatial Data Aided Game (SDAG). Game that uses data from GIS to create reality-like environment or provide data about that environment. Ok, let’s have some fun then.

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