I'm grateful once again to the sharp-eyed Jack Hanson for pointing me, via New Scientist towards Outerra. Occupying a nice somewhere between Google Earth and Second Life, Outerra is a planetary rendering engine, allowing "seamless planet rendering from space down to the surface."
This is an interesting development, a true virtual world, unlike Google Earth for example which as an amalgam of remotely sensed data merely warehouses digital representations of the real world. I'm put in mind of David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds - there are endless interesting possibilities.
This is an interesting development, a true virtual world, unlike Google Earth for example which as an amalgam of remotely sensed data merely warehouses digital representations of the real world. I'm put in mind of David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds - there are endless interesting possibilities.
The free technical demo is certainly impressive and there is considerable potential here for visualizing one's own data using the sandbox tools provided as part of the paid for version.
