by Matthew Bleicher
What if there was a virtual world that looked an awful lot like the world right outside your window? A photorealistic world where skyscrapers towered above your head. One where every window you see really has a room behind it. What if accessing this world was as easy as pointing your Web browser or even your cell phone to a site that hosts this information – with no software to install at all? Sound to good to be true? Well, it very well might be true.
LivePlace.com briefly had a video showing such a place on their site. The video was taken down not long after TechCrunch found it and contacted one of the apparent owners of LivePlace.com, Brad Greenspan (he is one of the co-founders of MySpace).
However you can still see this incredible video at TechCrunch’s site, located here.
Not only is this world stunning in its looks (it really is quite realistic looking) but the claim is made that it requires no software installation to run. This would mean near-universal access, with Windows, Mac and Linux all able to access the same world.
Additionally they claim everything is rendered in real time. So what does this mean? It means that the world is not a static one that is simply waiting for people to see it. It is literally being drawn and redrawn as people access the world, make changes to it and even simply walk around it.
Normally this takes a lot of computing power on the part of the user. However, the technology that they are using means that the rendering is done on their side of things and requires little computing power on the part of the device accessing the world. That is why they claim that even a web-enabled cell phone could visit.
It would be easy to see how a world this realistic with this level of accessibility could break virtual worlds right into the mainstream. This could be a massive breakthrough. Assuming that this is whole concept is real.
Of course, this video was posted on their site with no real context. No one from LivePlace is talking and the video is now gone. So for now, we just have to hope that this glimpse into the world is real. Until then, this is just a cool video showing us what virtual worlds might be like in the months and years ahead.
