Massive online activity - all is not as it appears - Fin

[Update: interesting tweet exchange w @0mgould at bottom]

I wrote over the past weeks why Pokémon Go is not what it seems:

• from being hailed as the next big thing in geospatial (neither open nor intended to be)
• to hiding the access / marketing in&outs its hosts indulge in (internet privacy anyone?)

Well "the penny dropped" over all the hoopla upon reading a TechCrunch article Why Minecraft predicts the future of collaborative work - neither will I pretend to know the pundits' minds, not will I try to review the reams of reviews this unleashed - but let me draw up a Ben Franklin (compare&contrast table ushered in by its namesake) adding a third development from 5 years ago you may/not have heard of the unsolved monkey virus protein Foldit gamers helped solve.

Go compare from Andrew Zolnai

Note: a Google Earth Blog (one yet another VR app) says "The Google Earth API doesn’t allow game code to detect the new type of 3D imagery," and "Google does not allow the data to be extracted from Google Earth or Google Maps and doesn’t have any option to licence the data for other uses", in other words: hands-off 3D data!

There's also a great review incl. Sim City by a Brazilian of that generation, passable Google translation for us non-Brazilians. BBC Click also covered No Mans Sky recently, also an online procedurally created online world to be released soon. This is a huge area with AutoDesk's Revit engine, as well as ESRI's City Engine (first known for the 2006 cartoon movie Cars) started in 2000 and 2005 respectively.

There is no doubt that BIM, geodesign and smart cities are the next big thing in geospatial... so any new collaborative procedures are welcome news to all! A spectacular upside to openness is a summer student creating a 3D map of Great Britain using MineCraft, which host Ordnance Survey released for public use, even created a geologic map... Here is their longish intro:

So let's see what other apps will really provide such heralded progress, shall we?

PS: interesting twitter exchange on this:

interesting perspective, AZ. https://t.co/RxKZ9edTKI

— michael GOULD (@0mgould) August 8, 2016

@azolnai @InsideIntergeo what it DID do is assemble the many pieces, get people off their sofas, AND generate revenue w a geogame!

— michael GOULD (@0mgould) August 8, 2016

@azolnai @InsideIntergeo so it was a business win (so far) rather than a technology win

— michael GOULD (@0mgould) August 8, 2016

@0mgould @InsideIntergeo agree PokemonGo biz win, but it's still a gaming platform NOT all the other things it's been attributed #coolurjets

— Andrew Zolnai (@azolnai) August 8, 2016