Geocaching was one of the early gaming uses of GPS technology. In geocaching, players follow coordinates to find containers and log the contents of those continainers within an online community. Jeremy Irish, CEO of Groundspeak, the creator of the geocache community, loves to find ways to use geolocation technologies to get people outside in the sun. He explains here some of the tips and tricks that make the creation of these kinds of games fun and successful.
Some of the same tips apply in reverse, too, as W. James Au describes some of the newest ways real world geographical data is making its way into massive multiplayer online games and virtual worlds like Second Life. Affordable accessible real world data for even weather and air traffic are being used in immersive 3D not just for gaming, but even for business applications like training and meetings.
Taken together, these two perspectives suggest a blurring between the boudaries of real and virtual worlds. With rising travel costs and shrinking budgets, businesses may increasingly look for virtual alternatives to engage and communicate with people distributed throughout the world. In addition, virtual worlds may allow us to take virtual adventures in far flung parts of MMO's.
Jeremy Irish is the President and CEO of Groundspeak and founded Geocaching.com in September 2000, the first official web site for geocaching. Irish spent four years as a Cryptologic Linguist before graduating from the University of Maryland. He has over 11 years experience in web-based application development including three years as a Webmaster at General Electric. He manages the Groundspeak development team and is responsible for the majority of Groundspeak's platform development.
W. James Au has written about high-tech culture for over 10 years, and is the author of "The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World." He has been, at various times, a freelance reporter, a metaverse consultant, a game developer, a screenwriter, and since 2003, a white-suited avatar named Hamlet Au, the first embedded journalist in a virtual world. He still reports upon his experiences in Decond Life on his blog, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com). He and his writing on Second Life have been profiled in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, Harvard Business Review, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the BBC, CNN International, NPR's All Things Considered, among many other places.
Au also covers the game industry, especially online worlds, for GigaOM.com, one of the web's most popular blogs on the Internet business and high tech industry. He has spoken on all aspects of Second Life, online virtual worlds, and related Internet issues at such places as The Milken Institute, South by Southwest in Austin, The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, O'Reilly's ETech series, The Education Arcade (sponsored by MIT), Stanford's Metaverse U Conference, the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference, and twice at State of Play (sponsored by Yale and New York Law School).
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