In-world data services in virtual environments

Abstract

This paper presents a set of data services that allow access to real life digital information within virtual environments. Since the emergence of virtual environments, technology has continued to evolve offering more powerful and more sophisticated virtual worlds. No longer just a tool for researchers, these environments have since become a presence in people's lives. Some of these may include video games while others are more social, like Second Life TM and Microsoft's New Xbox Experience. Data services provide real life synchronicity making the virtual environment a better interface for researchers and educators. In this paper we investigate how to make data sources available in virtual environments, monitor and virtually represent information, we also study the limitations of these data services and the ability to transfer data in parallel between real and virtual life. The implementation presented is based on Second Life (SL) a successful virtual environment created by Linden Labs. Among its features, SL gives its users the ability to create virtual programmable objects and to use basic http based data transfers. To illustrate our study, we use three different objects: a weather object that calls the NOAA's web service, a sensor object that virtually represents an array of sensors deployed throughout South Carolina, and finally a parallel data transfer object that demonstrates some intrinsic limitations of Second Life.