headlines…

*Latest Game Developers Conference report. “This medium is going to destroy TV - and it’s going to happen in short term.”, “Five years from now a social networking site without a 3D universe will look like a dinosaur.”

*Sony releases ‘Home‘ on the PS3

Unype ( pronounced like unite ) is a simple tool that combines Google Earth and Skype to create the ‘Multi-user Google Earth‘, [2], [3], [4] .

I had been at SGI’s Cosmo Software and worked on vrml and Cosmo Player and on X3D. Later, I worked on the Blendo project for Sony. And then the Emma3d project. So I’ve been going at this for over 12-13 years trying to create demand in Snow Crash platforms with not much success until the demand started forming from a completely different direction with MMORPG gaming and the great Second Life along with cheap and abundant broadband connections and cheap gaming computers.

I’ve been eyeing Google Earth since it first came out but only recently the APIs and KML became suitable for an application like Unype. While the API and KML capabilities still are not rich-enough ( listening to camera movements, tracking changes to models, and many more things are missing ), I hope these will evolve along with Unype.

So this is like a mashup, except it’s a C++ application, so it’s a MashApp, please let us know what you think.