Multimedia mashups for mirror worlds

Abstract

Mirror worlds are virtual worlds that reflect real world locations and events; they may be composed from many sources and exposed to support a wide variety of applications. Building mirror worlds requires the integration of several capabilities in both the content pipeline and the runtime. We describe two case studies to identify the elements of a format's content model are best suited for mirror world representation. The first one increases public accessibility for NOAA's Science On a Sphere®. The second involves the web-publication of geospatial data relating to Blacksburg, Virginia. Through these studies, we examine the challenges encountered, and the implications that those challenges have for an improved mirror world content models. Our results indicate that X3D is a powerful portrayal platform for mirror worlds, and we propose a few improvements that would address the challenges we encountered.