A social space? A cartographically accurate proxy for the real world? Some VR terra incognito to be carved up by entrepreneurs and homesteaders? A white elephant?

Michael Fotoohi doesn’t know how the result of his three years spent world building will be received – or how it will evolve. But the co-founder and MD of developer Micazook says uncertainty is part of the programme. “We want to see how people behave,” Fotoohi explains. “We want to see how they claim property, build houses and attach data. It’s a learning curve.”

The ambition is to host and populate a 3D map of the planet, with businesses, homes and people. “We don’t know of anyone who has taken this on,” Fotoohi muses. “Maybe everyone else is smarter than us. Maybe it’s too much.”

Once, software had a shipping date, and version 2.0 came later. Early releases gave ground to internet patching, then the web 2.0 companies – Google, Twitter and others – abandoned final builds altogether. Perpetual beta mode is today’s state of the art, with software often developed in tandem with a community that adds content and even functionality. Windows 95 it isn’t. Progress can be buggy and frustrating, but lifting the ceiling on ambition and enabling users to contribute has led to extraordinary works, from Wikipedia and its visual equivalent in Flickr, to 85,000 iPhone apps and LittleBigPlanet’s one million player-generated levels.



And if you’re going to recreate the world, you haven’t got much choice but to ask the world for help. “This isn’t something you can do on your own,” says Fotoohi. “It’s impossible to literally map the whole world on your own, even for Microsoft.”

Google? “They can get the maps, but to put all the models everywhere you need gigantic resources. So we worked out how to do this in a feasible way, and we started.” The solution was inevitably to adopt a Wikipedia-style approach. “We give you the platform, you come and fill it up,” Fotoohi explains. “Find your house, put down your model, tag it – and then other people can actually find it in the right place, on the right street, almost like a GPS map.”

It’s a big goal for a tiny company with roots in mobile phone games. Fotoohi founded Micazook with two Polish programmers in 2004. Its first production was an unofficial port of Quake to a Nokia 6630; the company eventually made over a dozen 3D mobile games, distributed via Polish and Greek carriers. But it was an isometric game, i-Citizen, which hinted at Micazook’s current project. You could chat with others, shop and download music and videos, paying a subscription to access certain sub-games. “It was the first virtual world on mobiles,” Fotoohi claims.

Micazook soldiered on with mobile for a while, but, realising “everyone from the top down was losing money in the business”, eventually decided to extend the i-Citizen experience on to PC – but with a difference. “Everyone was doing virtual worlds,” says Fotoohi. “We thought: why not make the real one?”

Fast-forward, and Micazook is showing us the latest, frantically-pulled-together version of his company’s still-unnamed project. The demo begins with a globe of the Earth in space. We zoom in – rather jerkily in this pre-beta build – to hover over a map of New York.

Fotoohi explains that the sector of New York city we’re looking at comprises 4,096 smaller sections, which equates to hundreds of kilometres worth of data. The rotatable view features innumerable streets, each named, though no buildings as yet. “We’ve collated all the roads in pretty much every major or minor city in the world,” Fotoohi claims. “I’d say we have 95 per cent of the roads of any GIS [Geographical Information System].”