Dresden Museum Opens in SL

The Dresden Museum's Old Masters Gallery launched in Second Life in June.
According to Wired magazine:

Second Life [Museum] representatives say it's the first real-world museum to "clone" itself online, although virtual versions of other collections (most famously "Second Louvre," which has no official ties to the Paris museum) have popped up.

All 37,700 square feet of the 150-year-old building, plus the grounds outside, have been recreated, down to the trash cans and fountains in the courtyard and ceiling moldings, staircases and furniture within. The highlight, of course, is on the virtual walls: 750 paintings spanning 300 years of European art.

And Dresden isn't the only historical site to move to the net. The city of Cologne already has plans to open a virtual version of its famed cathedral, which has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1996, this month.

Live Earth Online

Today's LiveEarth event will be available online real time. The event brings together more than 150 of the world’s top musicians for 24-hours of music from 7 concerts across all 7 continents.

"Users can create their own program from all the show assets from around the world," said Kevin Wall, Live Earth founder and CEO of Control Room which is producing the shows. Snippet from c|net news.

Virtual World Hybrids

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reports on emerging hybrids of real virtual worlds, pointing to GoogleEarth, Photosynth (Windows only) and to a new entry in the field, Everyscape, due to launch this fall. Here is Time Magazine's pick of the best GoogleEarth pictures. Arrington was interviewed recently by the podcasters at iinovate.

For a brief background, here's the HTML version of "Experience of a Hybrid Information Space between an Outdoor Field and an Immersive Virtual World", published in 2005 by T. Ogi (University of Tsukuba, Japan) and T. Fujise (Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.)