London gets a Second Life

Someone with a bit of time on their hands (Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith, from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spacial Analysis, no less) has uploaded data from the urban landscape of London into Second Life. You can see it taking on 3D form in a Matrix-worthy way here:

Says the Doctor: “[W]e have managed to import our Virtual London model of 3 million plus buildings into a scrolling map. The map is built from prims that ‘rez’ [out] of a central point to build accurate models based on Ordnance Survey MasterMap with height data supplied by InfoTerra.

Fascinating!

Its actually great to see Second Life being used in a relevant way …

UPDATE: As an interesting follow-up, the Ordnance Survey requested that Dr Hudson-Smith’s crew remove this project from Second Life. The rotters!

« Links for 2007-12-30: Google, Second Life, Media Democracy, Moms, Marketers, Apple v Netflix, Virgin

Links for 2008-01-02 : Ad Agencies, MC Hammer, Audi, Digital Deadline, Sparks, DVRs, Apple »