GeoWorld

GeoWorld January 2013

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remote-sensing company GeoEye has been featured in many Hollywood films, including "Enemy of the State," "X-Men 3" and "The Bourne Ultimatum." In addition, people now are quite used to that familiar stylish camera zoom-in from space. Even local news stations use the effect to set context for stories. Digital visualization of Earth, with integrated geospatial imagery, has become the norm and a popular expectation in mass media. The Global Game Map But there's one relatively unexplored technological and commercial niche: popular video games based on geospatial imaging and modeling technologies. Re-factored as a video game engine, the Web-based digital globe has enormous potential, and it's just starting to be realized. Several popular top-down-perspective games have emerged in the last few years that use geospatial imagery as their primary game environment, including Binary Space's "Class 3 Outbreak," a zombie outbreak simulation game for desktop and mobile platforms, and "Mini Maps," a free Mini Cooper racing game on Facebook, by Unit 9. These games use the common technique of layering and animating image sprites over geospatial base imagery to create the illusion of live action on a real-world map. Both of these titles were built using the Google Maps API and manage to demonstrate intelligent building edge detection and collision logic, working only with 2-D imagery. Unknown to most people, there has been an interactive flight simulator built into the standard Google Earth client since 2007. In 2008, Google released a free Web-browser plug-in version of the Google Earth client, along with an associated JavaScript API. In just a few years, several novel and interesting browser-based games and simulators have been developed using this technology, including the following: 1. "Apollo 11 Moon Lander," an interactive simulator of the 1969 lunar landing 2. "Google Earth Flight Simulator Online," a free multiplayer flight simulator with a variety of aircraft 3. "youbeQ," a social-gaming platform 4. "Drive the A-Team Van," a city driving game by PlanetInAction, Google and Fox 5. "Geoception," an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) command-and-control combat-simulation game 6. Several driving simulators and mini-games The popularity and usability of this API is largely due to the fact that it's essentially a JavaScript version of Google's popular KML specification, plus some additional programmatic controls. The widespread popularity of KML gives Google a major head start in this area. Imagery/LIDAR Special Issue Indeed, Google recently introduced "Ingress," its new mobile-platform-based augmented-reality massively multiplayer online game. In 2009, GeoEye partnered with video-game developer Ubisoft to create "Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.," an aerial combat game, as well as its recent sequel. These AAA titles took standard geospatial modeling techniques to the next level, producing full simulation of shadows, weather and optical effects similar to industrial/government simulation systems—but with the style and flair of a commercial video game. "Ubisoft can use this technology not only in air-combat games, but in any location around the world they want to stage a game," says Mark Brender, GeoEye's vice president of Corporate Communications and Marketing. "We bring a reality to the gaming industry and to Ubisoft that makes your game 'pop,' makes them jump out of the screen, because they look so real—because they're using real satellite imagery." "What if Nintendo Had Built Google Earth?" In 2010, game developer RealTime Worlds created the MyWorld gaming engine, allowing 3-D gaming in a stylishly rendered model of the real world. A promotional video provocatively asks "What if Nintendo had built Google Earth?", pointing out a fundamental lack of animated dynamism in the relatively static, markup-based GIS visualizations seen today. Their approach was to deliberately stylize the modeled environment so it wasn't totally photorealistic, but rather cute and cartoonish—ideal for a wide variety of simple, fun video games for a broad audience. The project currently lives on at a new company, eeGeo, which recently released its own promising 3D Maps ActionScript SDK to compete with the Google Earth JavaScript API. Boasting a more dynamic, animation-rich 3-D environment than traditional GIS visualizations, this "MiniMaps" by Unit 9 (left) and "Class 3 Outbreak" by Binary Space (right) demonstrate the creative use of image sprites layered over geospatial imagery. J A N U A R Y 2 O 1 3 / W W W . G E O P L A C E . C O M 15

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