VizWorld.com

You weren’t cool or old enough to be present at the historic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989?  How about now via virtual time travel in Twinity?

Walk through one of the open-air wall museum gateways at the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, and four other locations in Twinity and step back in time to 1989. From the Brandenburg Gate to Checkpoint Charlie – a 2 km, interactive stretch of the Berlin Wall including the infamous death strip will appear before your eyes.

Background information on the history of the GDR, from the building of the wall to German reunification, can be found at key points along the way.

Twinity.com | The Berlin Wall In Twinity

Graphics history, secondlife, twinity, virtual environment, virtual worlds

TechCrunch writes that Metaversum has received another 4.5m Euros to further develop Twinity, a “virtual world which re-creates the world’s cities for real-looking avatars to wander around.”

Twinity’s owner Metaversum, which has taken a totally different tack to the likes of Second Life, won the backing from existing investors Grazia Equity and Balderton Capital, which joined BFB BeteiligungsFonds Brandenburg from InvestitionsBank des Landes Brandenburg, which is managed by BC Brandenburg Capital and KfW. As you can tell the startup is based in Germany. The funding will be used for development and expanding internationally.

… In Twinity, members use real profiles and realistic-looking avatars. A virtual Berlin is in public beta right now, but a virtual Singapore is set to follow this summer, and London is under construction (much like the real London if you are familiar with its roads).

As someone working in developing true-3d digital cities and interested in this concept from a modeling & simulation standpoint, I bit the bullet, made an account, created an avatar and dropped into virtual Berlin.  Having never been to Berlin, I don’t know how the buildings and overall layout compare with the actual city, but a pop-up map tells you where you are.  After getting used to the mouse+keyboard interface, I walked around what is essentially a first-person “shooter,” teleported into an address inside a building (no interaction with entrances and egresses – a limitation of this “real” city) and took a peek around.  The insides of buildings, even individual users’ apartments, have a high level of detail built in, but not to the point where you can interact with furniture or look out a window and see the building or street across the way.

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Graphics feature, secondlife, twinity, virtual worlds