As part of our research project funded by the National Centre for E-Social Science we are working on Second Nature Island (part of the NATURE group) on importing geographic data into Second Life.We have just made a bit of a break through by importing data direct from a Geographic Information System (GIS) into our section of the world. As the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis the majority of our data is held in ArcMap, a GIS package made by ESRI.
The two images (each clickable for larger versions) illustrate the 32 London Boroughs extruded according to their embedded data. Each Borough can be queried and more importantly can now be visualised in Second Life.
It is still early days but an exporter from ArcMap to Second Life would be a unique step in the aim to share geographic data in collaborative environments.
Thanks go to Joel at CASA for writing the scripts.
New paper of interest:
ReplyDeleteWeb GIS in practice V: 3-D interactive and real-time mapping in Second Life
http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/pdf/1476-072x-6-51.pdf
See also 'Second Life GIS' section at http://healthcybermap.org/sl.htm