Can’t get enough of airplanes in the real world?
Now you can have aircraft hanging in the air all around you as real-time aviation data are displayed in the virtual world, thanks to a new visualization from Daden Limited and aircraft tracking specialists FBOWeb.com.
The visualization takes FBOWeb.com’s near-live data of aircraft locations around LAX and displays the planes as small models over a map of southern California at Second Life, a 3-D online virtual world. The location, altitude and direction of aircraft, which are identified by their flight numbers, mirrors that of their real-world counterparts. The display updates every minute, moving the planes to their new locations.
Want more information? An avatar can walk across the map and touch an aircraft, revealing its flight path data.
All data are provided by the FAA, which FBOWeb.com uses to create a variety of tracking services in the real world, including real-time tracking of general aviation flights, flight alerts, historical flight reporting, pilot flight-time logging, and more. In the virtual world there is a five minute data delay, imposed by the FAA for security reasons, according to FBOWeb.com officials.
