Geography Reference
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space within which its users are able to construct the environment entirely themselves. From
the elevation of the landscape to the scale of a city, every part of Second Life's visual space is
editable. It is as close to the Metaverse that current technology allows and provides a unique
insight into the future of the Visual City. Benedikt (1996) states that, as virtual worlds are not
real in the material sense, many of the axioms of topology and geometry so compellingly
observed to be an integral part of nature can therefore be violated or reinvented as can
many of the laws of physics. It is this reinvention that allows attributes to be enhanced and
emphasized and the laws of gravity, density and mass to be excluded, allowing buildings to
be moved or deleted with the click of a mouse and allowing the user to fly above or anywhere
within the environment.
As such Second Life is a Visual City which does not collate to the cities in Google Earth. It
is a landscape of fictional space existing only on one of the 3000 servers that power Second
Life. The lack of gravity and the ability of avatars to fly or teleport to locations creates a
cityscape which differs considerably from the real world. With the limited design control -
there are no planners or architects - any user can create a virtual sprawl of spiralling urbanity
mixed with eccentric retail areas and recreational land use parcels.
In terms of the Visual City, you would not necessarily expect textual information to allow
the creation of a cityscape. Yet combined with a social network, text-based communication
can provide a uniquely visual view of the city as a whole. Text-based messages via mobile
phones are now part of everyday life. The first text message was sent in December 1992,
while SMS (short messaging service) was launched commercially for the first time in 1995
(Wilson, 2005). Text-based messaging is, in general, a one-to-one communication system.
To create a social space, the SMS needs to be shared via a wider network and thus it be-
comes one-to-many in its communicative potential through newly emerging services such
as Twitter.
Twitter is representative of the recent trend in social networking sites allowing people to
connect and communicate. Where it differs from sites such as MySpace is that it is purely
based on the SMS format of 140 maximum characters with the text entry box via Twitter
asking the simple question 'What are you doing?' As such, the system is applicable to short
and often pithy updates on a person's activity sent via mobile phone, instant messaging
device or via the Twitter website. The question is how can this text-based information
source create a Visual City? The answer is partly due to the shear number of users on Twitter
(in excess of 200 000) and the ability to include a user's location in the messages. Combining
the location of Twitter posts, known as Tweets, with a Google Maps Mashup generates the
ability to visualize what people are doing at different locations in a city in real time. We
illustrate the location of Tweets in Central London in Figure 9.9.
New visualizations of Tweets are currently emerging on an almost daily basis, allowing
the concept to scale to the global level with the ability to visualize in real time feeds of
people's thoughts and 'what they are doing'. Using Microsoft Live (Microsoft's web-based
mapping service), it is possible to visualize these one-way conversation flows updated every
5 seconds with either a global or street level view. Developed using a system known as Atlas
and GeoRss, a startup company, 'Freshlogic', have developed a mapping system that updates
these feeds geographically. Of interest in terms of the city is the overview which is gained
when viewing from above. By simply letting the system run, it will zoom into each new
location, complete with address, users' photographs and Tweet every 5 seconds. The system
also works with geotagged photographs via Flickr. Using the same Atlas system, the map will
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