Aircraft Tracking in Second Life

Dec. 5, 2007 - PRLog -- Aircraft hang in the air all around you in an innovative new visualisation from Virtual Worlds agency Daden Limited and aircraft tracking specialists fboweb.com. We believe that this the first time that real-time aviation data has been displayed in a virtual world such as Second Life (SL).

The visualisation takes fboweb.com's near-live data of aircraft locations around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and displays the aircraft as small models in Second Life over a map of southern California. Each aircraft shows its flight number and its location, altitude and direction mirrors that of its real world counterpart. The display updates every minute and the aircraft are moved to their new locations. An avatar can walk across the map, examining each aircraft and can touch an aircraft in order to reveal its flight path data.

The visualisation builds on previous work done by Birmingham UK based Daden Limited in taking data from Google Earth and displaying it in Second Life. Such combinations of systems (called mash-ups) provide a very rapid way of creating new systems, or combining or looking at data in new ways. For instance Daden were part of the consortium that developed the GeoGlobe - a 3D globe in SL that can display news feeds, earthquake data and other Google Earth information inside a huge Earth globe.

The flight data feed is provided to Florida-based fboweb.com by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) under its Aviation Situation Data to Industry (ASDI) program. fboweb.com uses this data to create a variety of value-added flight tracking services, including real-time tracking of General Aviation flights, flight alerts, historical flight reporting, pilot flight-time logging, and a number of other aviation-related informational services. The data feed is delayed by 5 minutes by the FAA for security reasons.

fboweb.com showcased the visualisation at the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) Convention held in Atlanta, Georgia on 25-27th September 2007.

“fboweb.com has a reputation for innovation and creativity in the aviation industry, and our Google Earth flight-tracking implementation is a perfect illustration of that fact,” said Andy Green, President of Aviation Data Systems, Inc (operators of fboweb.com). “Daden Limited has taken that creativity a step further and projected this unique ‘data visualization’ into the virtual universe.”

David Burden, Managing Director of Daden Limited, said “This is an excellent example of the power of Second Life, and virtual worlds in general, in providing a shared visualisation system. Visualisations such as this offer possibilities for both the consumer and for business operations and scientific research. Being able to walk around data, and view it with others, can bring out insight and analysis that would be impossible in 2D systems, or PC based 3D systems."

Daden and fboweb.com see the LAX demonstration as just a taster of what could be achieved in Second Life. Given enough virtual real estate almost every major aircraft flying over the United States should be shown in near real-time. Since the system can use simple Google Earth or XML feeds to obtain its data any country could have its aircraft movements tracked by such a system once the data feed is made available.


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Notes to Editor:

1.Daden Limited is a virtual worlds agency working in Second Life and other virtual worlds. Our aim is to help you engage with your audience using some of the most interesting technologies around today. We offer 4 main services:

Inform - help you understand virtual worlds
Involve - build your presence
Integrate - connect SL to/from web services & real world devices
Interact - create virtual characters & chatbots

Daden also provided the first public RSS to Google Earth interface in 2005. Daden is based in Birmingham UK. See www.daden.co.uk for more information.

2.fboweb.com provides web-based flight tracking and flight information services as well as a full compliment of aviation-related informational tools.

3.Second Life is a virtual world with over 11 million registrations, operated by Linden Lab. See www.secondlife.com for more information.

4.Google Earth and Google Maps are innovative web based mapping services launched by Google Inc. See http://earth.google.com/ and http://maps.google.com/ for more information.

LINKS:

The Second Life Demo can be visited at:
http://slurl.com/second life/daden prime/207/178/26/

or Teleport to Daden Prime (find it under Places or Map) (Second Life required)

MEDIA:

Images are available at:
http://www.daden.co.uk/media

A short video is available on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMH2-rCkz3Y


or search for “dadenmedia” in YouTube.

A higher resolution version (22MB) is at: www.daden.co.uk/media/fboweb.wmv

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Daden Limited is a virtual worlds agency based in Birmingham, UK. We have over 10 years experience working in Virtual Worlds. We offer consulting advice, design and build services, and have special expertise in the areas of web and real world integration, and creating interactive virtual personalities.

Website: www.daden.co.uk