.::Movie World::.

Microsoft and Google Vie for Virtual World Domination

Each acquires a company, hoping to add a new dimension to Internet mapping and searching

The headline-making rivalry in the Internet space today is between Microsoft Corp. and search engine champ Google Inc., two companies that have long demonstrated an equal willingness to spend money in pursuit of their aims. Now each of the rivals has made an acquisition that may point to the next big thing in the evolution of the Internet—the use of imagery, including photos taken from space, to give people browsing the Web instant access to near-perfect virtual representations of just about any spot on Earth.
Both companies are seeking to dominate what’s called in the jargon of the trade “local search”—electronic versions of the kind of information found in local telephone directories. It’s a market that generated more than US $3 billion last year and could reach $13 billion by 2010, says The Kelsey Group, a media research firm based in Princeton, N.J. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google’s Google Earth already give computer users the ability to enter the name of a city or a street address and watch as a photo giving a bird’s-eye view of the desired location appears on the screen. But your view is still limited mostly to the tops of buildings.
With Microsoft’s acquisition of Vexcel Corp. and Google’s of @Last Software, both in Boulder, Colo., the two competitors want to provide photos and highly realistic computer-generated simulations to give a heretofore unattainable sense of where, say, an amusement park is situated in relation to a hotel—and not just from above, but from the ground, as if you were right there. These acquisitions bring the rivals closer to achieving their ambitions of creating virtual worlds resembling the ones in video games but depending entirely on accurate topographical data generated from cameras and satellites.
What do users gain from these topographic representations? William B. Gail, vice president of mapping and photogrammetric solutions at Vexcel, offers this example of what services the company plans to offer in the next couple of years: “If you’re going to go shopping and you have a list of stores in, say, midtown Manhattan, it would be a lot different if you could actually visualize where you’re going to be.” Through these sites, he says, “You’ll be able to walk down the street, look in the storefronts, and see what’s there. If you’re planning to make restaurant reservations, you can virtually go inside a restaurant, sit at each of the tables, and select the one with the best view.”
Some form of this application is going to be available within the next two years, Gail predicts. And soon after, access to these ever-more-realistic virtual worlds will become part of every computer application. Electronic schedulers, for example, will present three-dimensional maps representing the locations of appointments, and in-car navigation systems will use this same capability to give drivers more information about the lay of the land. Traditionally, images of the Earth taken from planes and satellites have been used only for weather forecasting, land surveying, climate change research, and for strategic military applications.
The acquisition of Vexcel, which was finalized on 4 May, greatly enhances Microsoft’s ability to make precise measurements of the distances between landmarks appearing in 2?D images and to store and process vast amounts of image data. The hardware and software Vexcel produces for remote sensing and aerial mapping, such as the UltraCamD, an 86-megapixel large-format digital aerial camera, are recognized as some of the best in the mapping services industry.
Days before Microsoft disclosed its plan to purchase Vexcel, Google announced that it was acquiring @Last, best known for its SketchUp 3-D design software. Google, already confident that it can accurately account for the distances between landmarks in its local search database, got in SketchUp a tool that makes it much easier to translate this data to 3-D models. The software also makes it easy to add details that make the models appear more realistic—the ultimate aim of local search.
A cofounder of @Last, Brad Schell, says his company “brings with it the software and the engineering know-how that allow users to build whatever they dream up in three dimensions and then gives us the ability to overlay these designs on the virtual world being created [in Google Earth].”
Vexcel and @Last are but two of a cluster of small companies that have sprung up in the Boulder area—a major center of earth sciences, earth sensing, and computer modeling—to meet the needs of U.S. government scientists and aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin, Ball Aerospace, and Raytheon.
Another small Colorado company, Space Imaging Inc., in Thornton, was recently acquired by Orbimage Holdings Inc., of Dulles, Va., to form GeoEye, now the world’s leading provider of images taken from space. (That puts GeoEye ahead of SPOT, which is co-owned by the French aerospace and mapping agencies, the Alcatel group, the Belgian government, the Swedish Space Corporation, and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, or EADS.) Space Imaging and DigitalGlobe, in neighboring Longmont, Colo., provide a lot of what is seen on Virtual Earth and Google Earth, says Gail.
“There are a lot of start-ups here in Boulder—whether it be software, biotech, and, of course, satellite imaging companies,” says @Last’s Schell. “I’ve heard some folks describe it as the Silicon Valley of the Rockies.” Susan Graf, a spokesperson for Boulder’s Chamber of Commerce, says the city “is ranked as one of the best places to live by Forbes and Money magazines, and we have a wealth of well-educated people to work in the industry.”
An interesting wrinkle in the virtual worlds that Microsoft and Google are seeking to conjure up is that they will likely be populated in part with images contributed by consumers themselves, à la Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. According to an internal Microsoft document, all it would take to post images of your hometown is a cellphone with a camera. “Imagine hundreds of millions of users clicking photos and uploading them to create a very current virtual world spreading from New York City to villages in Botswana,” the document says.

Me TV: Welcome to the Vlogosphere

From digital cameras to peer-to-peer distribution software, new technologies make it easy to find, swap, and make video on the Web. Is this a good thing?

Video, particularly television video, despite its ubiquity, has long been a transient medium. We watch a show, and it vanishes. All the engineering brainpower in the universe has yet to deliver a videocassette recorder that can be easily programmed. TiVo and digital video recorders, now an option through many cable providers, make home taping easier but still don't scratch the itch for a video fix. Just as the boom in digital music (and piracy) proves, innovations in network technologies have given rise to a rabid need for instant gratification. We want our video, and we want it now. And, one way or another, people get it.

The first milestone in the path to transforming the Web into a platform for worldwide video comes, once again, from the underground. It started back in the late 1990s when Napster opened the floodgates for digital music distribution. Then Gnutella, an open-source file-sharing network, staked the flag for video. Suddenly, peer-to-peer technology was proving robust enough to deliver MPEGs as well as MP3s. But the files had to be relatively small.

Enter BitTorrent, today's overlooked gorilla in the vlogosphere revolution. By breaking up large files of data into easily transferable bits, BitTorrent transforms a computer into the greatest jukebox ever. With a few clicks, it's possible to suck in an entire season of "Desperate Housewives." Downloads can take all night. But queuing up a list of torrents before bedtime has become as rote as running the dishwasher; it works while you sleep and they're ready in the morning.

This, of course, makes the multibillion-dollar industries that still sell data on plastic discs very, very nervous. The Motion Picture Association of America, once sidelined by the furor over music piracy, is now taking a page from the recording industry's controversial playbook and litigating against BitTorrent traders. "There is no minimum threshold," warns Dean Garfield, the MPAA's director of legal affairs; "anyone who engages in piracy may be sued."

The creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen, is a lifelong puzzle master. His story is important to consider because it personifies the do-it-yourself ethos that has brought the online video revolution to life. The people behind this are self-taught, self-motivated, and filling a need that the corporate world can only vie to catch up with. Cohen began coding by seeing how fast he could crash the Timex Sinclair computer that his dad, a bioinformatics professor, brought home in the early 1980s. He programmed his own Connect Four game and competed in geek contests called Code Wars. But he lasted only two years as a computer science student at State University of New York in Buffalo before dropping out. "You don't need a certificate to be a programmer," he says, "you just go and do it."

Following the siren call of San Francisco's emerging cypherpunk scene, a subculture of privacy-conscious cryptography coders, Cohen headed west. By the time file-sharing programs like Napster and Gnutella hit the Net, Cohen had enough Skinny Puppy CDs that he didn't feel the need to pirate online. Plus, he didn't think the programs were very well written. Surfers could trade files with each other only one at a time. As if it were a new Rubik's puzzle, he committed himself to solving this faster. The solution was to break up the files so that numerous surfers could essentially upload and download them simultaneously. In geek-speak, this is called swarming. And it didn't take long for people to swarm BitTorrent.

When geeks deluged BitTorrent to swap new Linux software in early 2003, it went prime time. As one fan blogged, "Woohoo! BitTorrent rocks!" While Cohen was busy with his code, he never considered how it would be used. Gary Lerhaupt, a computer science master's student at Stanford, has embraced it as a new business model. His start-up, Prodigem, helps artists convert their music and films into BitTorrent files and, using fingerprinting technology, get paid for downloads. "This is a free culture movement that's empowering people," he says, "You can make money by giving people open access to your media. I don't think Hollywood realizes that yet."

But Hollywood is trying. The watershed moment for Me TV came on 12 October 2005, when Apple announced that the fifth-generation iPod, the company's ubiquitous digital music player, would support video too. Though the screen was small (2.5 inches diagonally) and the resolution shoddy (480 by 480, with a maximum pixel count of 230 400), the sheer giddy mobility of the platform was the stuff of a revolution. Video could be everywhere.

And it was. Along with news of the video iPod, Apple delivered the second punch, a revamped version of its popular iTunes digital download service. In addition to sucking down songs and audiobooks, consumers would now be able to choose from over 2000 music videos and short films. The biggest wave came from Disney, which reported that episodes of ABC television shows, including the hits "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," would be available for download at the cost of US $1.99 per episode. "For the first time ever, hit prime-time shows can be purchased online the day after they air on TV," said Robert Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Now instead of BitTorrenting your favorite TV show, you could pay for it!

But the dawn of the video iPod sent waves, of course, back through the underground too. And concurrent with the rise of the mobile video platform came another movement: the dawn of the home brewers. Homebrew video makers have taken to the Net in droves, uploading their own content for free download. Lowcost digital cameras and newfangled distribution outlets have spurred the phenomenon. Vidblogs (http://www.vidblogs.com/), and Vlog Map (http://www.vlogmap.org/) are two of the sites dedicated to the scene. Soldiers chronicle the war from Iraq. Nerds vlog from the Tokyo Game Show.

While video blogs, vlogs, or whatever you want to call them, are all the rage, they're not new. In 2000, "vog" pioneer Adrian Miles posted what's become a manifesto: "A vog respects bandwidth," he declares, "A vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television). A vog uses performative video and/or audio. A vog is personal. A vog uses available technology. A vog experiments with writerly video and audio. A vog lies between writing and the televisual. A vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media. A vog is Jean-Luc Godard with a Mac and a modem. A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog."

Vloggers have taken the manifesto to heart. Consider "It's Jerrytime!" (http://www.itsjerrytime.com/), a cult hit vlog that epitomizes what people's video is all about. The homemade series chronicles the hapless life of Jerry, an ordinary schlub contending with the trials of everyday life. Jerry, the star, writes the stories and does the music. His brother, Orrin, animates the entries with just a digital camera, Adobe After Effects, and clip art.

The effect is something like Harvey Pekar meets Hunter S. Thompson, a hallucinogenic take on the Sisyphean trials of everyday life. Each episode is rendered in a kind of skewed photorealism, where real pictures of Jerry are cut up and rearranged in something of a knock-off "South Park" style. In one, Jerry endures the wrath of his mush-mouthed landlord, who breaks into his apartment but refuses to fix a broken fridge or leaky pipe. In another, Jerry takes a job driving a billboard truck, only to crash it through a drive-through teller. Who needs Pixar when you have a dude like this?

And such tricks aren't only for Adobe masters. A copy of the old computer game Quake can also do the trick for wannabe animators. Since the ultraviolent first-person shooter was released 10 years ago, a subculture has flourished around so-called Machinima: computer-generated films made with game programs like id Software's Quake and Epic's Unreal. Much as they would make a computer game modification, Machinima directors put all their action into the game world, adding characters, graphics, sound, and dialogue. The result is kind of like having your computer game taken over by an NYU film student, from the Groove Tube riffs of Blahbalicious to the rough-and-tumble Gang Wars. It's all there for the taking at the main hub, Machinima.com.

Barebones vlogging is even easier to tackle. All you need is a digital camera and a program such as Movie Maker, which comes with Windows, or iMovie for Macs. The site Our Media (http://www.ourmedia.org/), a service provided by the Internet Archive, hosts anyone's media, from videos to photos, at no cost. Another free alternative is Blip TV (http://www.blip.tv/). Not surprisingly, pay-to-play services are moving in for the kill. Typepad (http://www.typepad.com/), Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/), and Blogware (http://www.blogware.com/) offer hosting for a fee.

What's next for Me TV? Cold, hard e-cash. Now that BitTorrent and vlogging have brought video power to the people, the next phase of online video is monetization. Google and Yahoo have entered the game, allowing people to search, download, and share videos. And a start-up called Blinkx.tv (http://www.blinkx.tv/) is refining its own video search tool, which trolls thousands of hours of video, from TV to vloggers.

A new generation is growing up with video at its fingertips. And the old generation is getting in tune. My friend Mike now has his own videos on the Web. They're short films of his 4-year-old son dressed up like a pirate and enacting homemade plays. The "Wish I Had a Cat" video, alas, is still missing in action. But stay tuned. If it ever surfaces, you'll find it online.