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Page 3 of 5 At the end of April, Google released its free Sketch-Up program, which allows people to create 3-D layers to place over Google Earth, and Google is encouraging real estate investors and developers to utilize the tool. Chris Taylor of CNN Money’s Business 2.0 magazine says, "The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What's a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel Snow Crash. The metaverse was Stephenson's name for a virtual world where his characters play and do business. It was a black ball 1.6 times the size of Earth, with a giant street running around its equator. "In Stephenson's novel, millions of users uploaded customized 'avatars,' or virtual personalities, and strolled the street, entering shops and exclusive nightclubs, conversing and trading with the metaverse's other denizens. It was, in effect, a 3-D version of the web.” Virtual worlds may seem more applicable to players of World of Warcraft, EverQuest, or other role playing games (RPGs). But as Taylor says, you can envision your mom downloading Google Earth and fiddling with it. "I would expect to see someone using Google Earth as a virtual social space by the end of the year," says Jerry Paffendorf, research director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a futurist organization, who helped arrange something called the Metaverse Roadmap Summit, a gathering of programmers of virtual worlds. Even if we are not in the near future planning on populating the virtual universe, one thing is clear. Google and its advances in search engine technology will never be the same, and they are unrecognizable from the primitive search engine launched over a decade ago.
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