ETH Research Lab and III Commonwealth Youth Games 2008, Pune : driveme.in

Apart from the social network sites, people often visit Second Life to get

the experince and feel of any place. For example, some organizations have built

up a virtual building inside Second Life which is exactly same as in real world.

So user can see, take a tour and also have meetings arranged virtually.

www.driveme.in is a website which has built up an exact replica of a city on the

web. It was built keeping in mind that a visitor will get a complete experince

of driving through the streets of a city before he actually visits it. Providing

community based features such as flagging of places, local business listing, etc

were also among its objectives. Apart from these, the site is also an

alternative web based advertising platform for individual as well as businesses.

Regarding business challenges, they didn't face any because the project was

first of its kind and did not have any compititors. Two different orgainizations

that have benifited from this project inlcude Commonwealth Youth games 2008

website, where this project served as a great utility for visitor to experience

the place before they actually visited and secondly, ETH research lab, which is

located in a remote location. Here the event was attended by about 1000 guests,

and driveme.in provided visual driving directions on its website. As of now,

only Pune and Panchgani are there on the site. In the future, more places will

be added . A mobile based solution is also in the pipeline.