Virtual world meets the real world

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

LOS ANGELES - In an engineering lab at the University of Southern California, graduate student Arjun Rihan pulls on a pair of gadget-laden gloves and begins pointing at a computer-generated map of the main campus. As Rihan gestures at the plasma screen, the grid of streets and buildings begins to whirl.

"We have liftoff," Rihan jokes. Within seconds, he has focused the map down to a campus plaza. Tiny figures walk back and forth, and cars drive along the adjacent street. It looks like a realistic video game.

But this is no game. Instead, the scene blends virtual imagery with five video streams from cameras mounted just outside the lab building. Those are real people in the picture.

The USC software project — known as Geospatial Decision Making, or GeoDec — delivers the kind of real-time data layering that was made up for books like "Snow Crash," movies like "Minority Report" and TV shows like "24." Adam Clayton Powell III, director of USC's Integrated Media Systems Center, says that "it's fictional if you're watching '24,' but it's real in here."

More than visualization
GeoDec takes visualization databases such as Google Earth and MSN Virtual Earth to the next level, and indeed both those ventures have taken an interest in the project.

(MSNBC.com content is distributed by MSN. MSNBC itself is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

GeoDec, however, is much more than a visualization program, says computer scientist Cyrus Shahabi, one of the leaders of the USC research team.

"Once you have all the data about the area, in addition to just visualizing what's there with the 3-D models and the video and so on, you can start asking questions," he told MSNBC.com this week. "You might say, 'I want to see all the accidents in this area.'"

Or you might pose more complex queries: What's the optimal time and place for taking a bus from point A via transfer station B to point C? Which trees need to be trimmed because they're getting too close to the power lines? Which routes of travel might leave a target open to a sniper's line of sight? That's where the "decision-making" aspect of GeoDec comes to the fore.

GeoDec could conceivably be applied to fields ranging from urban planning to emergency response to military surveillance — with multiple agents accessing the same multilayered database. "It's Web-based," Rihan said during a demonstration earlier this month, "so you could have somebody in another aircraft or location looking at this on a PDA, so you're looking at the same information."

After the demonstration, a military visitor said privately that such a system could come in handy in Iraq. "We just did not have anything close to this that could take numerous viewpoints and combine them," he told MSNBC.com.

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