The Real World is the title of an MTV show in which a few young people are followed every day with a camera to register their daily life. Or at least, their inspiring and exciting daily life for the duration of the show when the ‘stars’ of the show live in a beautiful house in a vibrant city somewhere in the USA – Miami, New York or Los Angeles – and the odd crossing to Europe, for example to London. The people in The Real World often work for television, sing in a band or design for a fashion house. Most of the time, they are good-looking and successful in life and love. And even though for a lot of them success does not continue after the show when they return to their normal daily life, MTV never has any trouble in finding plenty of candidates for a new series. The Real World is the mother of the real-life soap as it appears in every country all over the globe. The real world is appealing, not only to television watchers, but also to professionals in geomatics. All manufacturers in the surveying and mapping industry want to approach the real world as much as possible with their products. And they succeed. Bit by bit, they succeed. From plain data through abstract models to two- and now three-dimensional visualisation, the industry comes up with new applications that approach reality as much as possible. The newest technology was there to be admired at Intergeo 2005 in Düsseldorf (see review on page 41): 3D visualisation of a high level whereby special 3D glasses are no longer necessary. It is not only visualisation that aims for as much reality as possible. Developments in data processing and determination of location are also heading to a much higher level of real-time. The standpoint becomes: I want to process my data here and now and therefore I need to know where I am right now. Therefore I need pictures that are as real as possible. The real world will, in years to come, become the standard visualisation in mapping software. From real-world visualisation to real-time here and now, professionals from the industry will be stars playing major roles in their own ongoing series The Real Geomatics.

On 15 September we received the sad news that Jacques Sipkes, our contributing editor, died at the age of 59 years after a brief illness. Jacques joined the editorial board of GIM International in 2001 and from that time on he contributed with never-ending enthusiasm about all kinds of developments in geomatics. Our thoughts are with his life companion, Adija, and his daughter, Zuhura, his relatives and all the others around the globe who will truly miss the inspiring personality that Jacques was. On page 39 you will find an obituary written by colleague and editor-in-chief Mathias Lemmens.