BigShinyThing

There’s always been a real division between the physical and online worlds: if you’re sitting in front of a screen, you have only a window into the virtual. Likewise, others online have only limited access to your physical presence, be that through email, IM, webcam — there’s a chokepoint where reality, fantasy and interface bandwidth intersect. Cue much theorising about the ‘cyborg identity construct’ and ‘life on the screen’ in 1990s media theory. As the cultural theorists contended — and the current explosion of MMORPGs proves — there’s much identity-morphing fun to had: today’s digital natives are as comfortable engineering their online personæ as they are changing the ringtone on the latest Nokia.

But there’s a downside to these loose connections between physical and virtual. Think for example of an art gallery. It occupies physical space, and if you’re present there, you can interact with both the artworks and the other people present. The gallery probably also has an online presence, but if you’re online, you don’t generally have any meaningful way to interact with what’s going on in the physical gallery, and vice versa. The two worlds don’t connect.

There have been a few attempts to bridge the void between worlds, and to build hybrid social media, where the physical and the virtual grade one into the other — witness for example Radio One’s clunky integration of their One Big Weekend festival into current darling-of-the-digerati ‘life game’ Second Life. Nice try, but there’s still a gap between the worlds — the BBC concedes that “those attending the Second Life rock festival will not be able to see avatars of their favourite artists”, and likewise those getting down and muddy in the physical world won’t be able to mosh with those online who are experiencing “an authentic festival experience on a virtual mud-slide”. Ahem.

Clumsy indeed. However, tech-art projects (and cybersex technologies) aside, that’s as good a collapsing-together of the physical and virtual as we’ve seen. But as of this week, we suspect that’s all going to change. Why? Google, which has released SketchUp — a 3D design tool which enables punters to create objects and plunk them down in the world of Google Earth.

So what you say? Well, think ahead. Add avatars (currently missing from Google Earth), and suddenly you have a set of technologies that start to close the gap between physical and virtual. Consider the enablers: Google Search knows about stuff. All kinds of stuff. And where it is, who knows about it, what it does. Google Earth knows about physical space. And with the addition of SketchUp, Google enables people to add models of physical-world-things into an easy-to-use representation of that space. And we already have rumours that Google is working on GPS navigation tools.

Glue this all together: imagine Google Earth 2.0 as a Second Life-style virtuality, but using real world maps. If you have a Google navigation-enabled mobile device, your online avatar can follow you around the physical world. Location-sensitive advertising? Check. Interaction between people visiting a site online and people in the related physical location (via IM, VoIP etc)? Check. Possibilities for augmented reality gaming and marketing? Oh yes. We’re seeing the possibility here of Google enabling a whole new augmented media landscape, with a new language of spatial isomorphism between physical and virtual worlds. One step closer, but to what? Stay tuned.

[via Business 2.0]