GeoSim on Building a Virtual Philadelphia

GeoSim started its work in mirror worlds developing terrain models for the Israeli Air Force. After years and millions in work with the military, it switched to the commercial side of things, beginning with city models. The first of which is Virtual Philadelphia in partnership with the Center City District and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has been in a quiet beta operation over the last few months, but will be launching new features, like avatars, next week and aiming for a full public launch sometime in November.  At that time, GeoSim hopes to have launched with commercial activities, featuring shops, stores, and museums.

"The city model is still a major investment," explained CEO Victor Shenkar.  "We would feature it as an application platform that could at the same time support infrastructure planning, security, and training at the same time as business, search, and local real estate, and, last, but not least, games and social interaction."

The city of Philadelphia hasn't begun to really capitalize on the software on its own, though. Shenkar said that GeoSim has been asked to build models of several large construction projects going up around the city to show the before-and-after effects, but his hope is to have the city begin to leverage its data and existing models on its own.  Shenkar said GeoSim has also drawn interest from the real estate industry, providing indoor and outdoor tours showing off houses and neighborhoods.

The bigger application, at least for the start, is tourism. Over 25 million people visit each year, and that's an early, low-hanging fruit.  GeoSim, said Shenkar, is close to signing a deal to re-create the Constituion Center and has already signed a partnership with USHistory.org. The mirror world will use the website's content and re-create historical places around Philadelphia and, launching next month, direct some of its 3 million monthly uniques into Virtual Philadelphia.  The hope is that showing off sites and locales will encourage more physical visits as well as online traffic.

"The Constitution Center says that many people are visiting their website before coming to Philadelphia. They come close to the building with these huge glass doors, and they don’t go in," said Shenkar. "They told me about their frustrations that this glass door is somehow perceived as a barrier. They told us that if you could build the interior and show them what they have, they’d have many more visitors."

After addressing the tourism industry, Shenkar says GeoSim's second wave of applications will target local users with social interactions and advertising.

"We believe the main leverage to bring users to this new medium is personalization, not user-generated content," said Shenkar. "We have no intention of providing our users with tools to build their houses or furniture or apartments. They will go to stores and be greeted by avatars who show purchasing and knowledge of their personal details and are helpful and nice and personable."

Some of that may happen automatically, with non-player characters greeting customers or showing off a potential property, but then GeoSim will provide avatars for salespeople to directly communicate to their users. It's an approach, Shenkar says, that many of the approached companies have been embracing.

The bigger challenge, it often seems, is in convincing consuemrs to log on.  Virtual Philadelphia looks good--and there are plenty of virtual re-creations of Philadelphia, for some reason, to compare it to. GeoSim combines  topdown views and aerial re-creations with street-level 3D modeling. Shenkar compares to what would be possible if Google or Microsoft integrated their main mapping functions with their streetviews and full models.

Even so, users still have to download the application and install it, which is always a barrier. Shenkar recognizes that and notes that there's no way to know what will happen until its Novemeber launch, but he's optimistic that the experience will be enough to draw  users in.

"The principle is to have a compelling user experience. That’s the basics of every Web enterprise," he said. "I think if you can manage to download and install us on a machine with a good broadband connection, it is compelling. It’s really fun: you can walk, you can fly, you can jump like Spider-Man, you can find places, and it really is like Philadelphia. That comes with actual useful information like directions, historic tours, and ecommerce with visualizations and CRM tools, showing people real estate. It’s about being useful."