Less than a week after Pokémon Go’s launch, our streets are already filled with packs of phone-wielding, Weedle-catching zombies. They’re robbing our teens, filling our churches with sinners, and tricking our children into exercising. But worst of all, Pokémon Go is turning us all into an army of narcs in service of the coming New World Order.
A former president of South Korea, a guy pushed over a bridge, an actress, and two cases of assisted: suicides are all over the news this weekend. What the hell is going on?
Hope and change has come to Google Maps. The official residence of the vice president, obscured until Dick Cheney's last days in office and residence, now shines in satellite sunlight.
Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets is shocked, shocked that the team working on Google Earth, Google's 3D interactive world map, launched a mobile app for the iPhone before writing one for Google's Android operating system, which now runs on all of one clunky phone sold by T-Mobile, the also-ran of the U.S. wireless market. He calls the decision "inexplicable." I don't think it's hard to understand at all: Google Earth programmers actually want people to use their app, rather than have gadget bloggers write posts celebrating their clever strategery.
Commercial satellite imaging company GeoEye launched its first satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California on Saturday. GeoEye 1's camera gear packs a scary 16-inch resolution from orbit. (That's for black and white images. Color photos will have 5.5-foot resolution.) The $500 million satellite is partly funded by the Department of Defense, despite the Google logo on the side of the launch rocket.A Google spokesman said Sergey and Larry "look forward to getting some real quality, high-resolution imagery into Google Earth" in three to four months — presumably enabling close-ups in areas not trespassed by Google's Street View trucks. But with Google and the DOD sharing a satellite, the tinfoil-hat theories start now.
Palestinian militants use Google Earth to target rocket attacks on the Israeli military, the Guardian reports. The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade rockets have killed about a dozen people in Sderot over the last three years. Of course, the news is hardly a mark against the company's "don't be evil" credo. Google Earth is only as good, or evil, as its users. Right now, KPBS in San Diego is using Google Maps to alert residents to the locations of nearby out-of-control fires.
Except "everyone" is all the other digital entertainment companies gunning for the virtual-world market. A structured Japanese virtual world named "meet-me," covered by the Associated Press, aims for something closer to The Sims than Second Life. Meanwhile, Sony is building Home, a world for the PS3. And of course Google will turn Google Earth into a virtual world. Second Life's first-mover advantage isn't much in the face of such giants.
"It turns out that there are a lot of people who lay out in Amsterdam." — John Hanke, director, Google Earth, at Technology Review's EmTech conference, identifying his service's killer application: Using satellite maps to locate and annotate nude Dutch sunbathers.
Who's the mysterious force behind "My World," Google's rumored foray into virtual worlds? Signs point to Google engineering manager Niniane Wang who's currently leading a "confidential project," which was thought to be a virtual world back in January. According to her resume, the project relies on C++ and Java — both languages are used in serious game development. Prior to her move to California in 2003, she was a lead design engineer at Microsoft Games working on Flight Simulator 2004 and racing games. Sounds like the perfect background for a fly-through metaverse.
Here we go again. Google is, apparently, terraforming Google Earth, its 3-D flythrough of the planet, into a virtual world. Rumored for more than a year, particularly since the acquisition of 3-D modeler Sketchup, confirmation of Google's new "My World" comes in the form of a beta-testing questionnaire circulated among Arizona State University students asking, on behalf of a major Internet company, whether they were into games and social networking, and already had an avatar and a Gmail account. If anyone can pull off a virtual world that's actually interesting, it's Google. But this is like prospecting in the old West. Everyone from Sony to Linden Lab on down is attempting to cash in on the hot new "virtual world" frontier. Eventually, they'll figure out that it's dry, dusty, and mined out. It's just a question of how long that will take.
"There will soon be more avatars than humans, at least in the industrialized world," writes The Guardian's Victor Keegan, riffing off Gartner Research's proclamation that 80 percent of active internet users will participate in virtual worlds by 2011. Keegan's bet is that Google Earth will become the next virtual meeting ground. [The Guardian]
Well, not all of India, just those "sensitive" locations such as "laboratories, mines, military sites, space and atomic centres and residences of high-profile VVIPs." This is hardly new, as Google Earth has complied with requests to blur "military camps in Kosovo, the king's palace in the Dutch Utrecht, military sites in the UK, as well as IBM research centers in New York." Google's own offices remain visible in Google Earth, on both the East and West coasts, or in a hideous amalgam of the two.
