This is a rough spec for an implementation of a realtime virtual world using OpenStreetMap data and voxel.js. The basic idea is to encode feature data pulled from Mapbox vector tiles as overzoomed tiles, which can be represented as voxels. This allows for easy scalability, since it utilizes existing algorithms and architecture.
Controlling your nodebot using a USB cable is great and all, and obviously you could shell out and grab a sparkcore or some other dedicated controller but what if you've got a standard arduino and you want to take an existing nodebot wireless?
Bluetooth is an option and there's this excellent JohnnyFive wiki entry that will help you there. Bluetooth can be a bit flaky though and it's range is pretty lousy. You can also look at things like XBees and what not using point to point serial, but these are expensive and very fiddly to get working.
Really, what we want is a method of transferring data over a nice, simple, standard method, requiring little configuration, low cost and we can utilise a whole stack of the code we've already produced.
http://github.com/legastero/stanza.io -- An XMPP over Websocket library that does XMPP in the browser, but exposes a JSON api. Includes a Jingle plugin.