Not A Blog™

There’s been a lot to do, recently, about Google’s new street view feature. At first I was going to talk about that, but truth be told, I don’t really have much to say about it. Many people are harping on the privacy issue and, while I’ll be the first to defend privacy, Google is clearly within those legal legalities. They’re doing it on a larger scale than anyone else has, but time and time again the courts have maintained that photographs taken from public property don’t infringe anybody’s rights. Interestingly, some people have been hassled for taking pictures due to “security concerns”, but when you make a huge production out of it—driving around a large black van with a spindly array of cameras on the roof—this is not a terrorist threat. Never mind that no one has any clue what that vehicle is doing.

Not to change the subject, but the only thing terrorists have to do to defeat “photography bans”—or whatever other misguided attempts at security are these days—are to take some sort of generic automobile and make it look like a super-official fleet vehicle for a company who does things skirting the top-secret. Then you can mount antennae or satellite dishes or, heck, entire bombs to the outside of the van and nobody is going to bother you because it looks “official”. Print up a couple fake IDs with a fake company name and if anyone stops you, tell them the project is “classified”. Of course the first step is to not look like you just stepped out of Baghdad and it helps to not speak with a middle-eastern accent; officialness is key.

So Google is driving around on public roads taking public pictures. They’re just doing a lot of them on a bigger scale than anyone previously. Someone asked if people would be so willing to put up with it if it were the CIA or NSA doing this sort of thing. After all, it would still be legal, but people would be outraged, would they not? Perhaps, but that’s not the point; the point is that Google is doing it for them, so they don’t have to risk bad PR. Besides, the government is inefficient enough that they would have a hard time actually getting it done—unless they paid someone else to do it. Some corporation with the wherewithal to take on the project and get it finished, all the while advertising it as a public service and telling everyone that they are, most decidedly, “not evil”.

Okay, enough with the conspiracy theories. The point is that while street view is kind of cool, and allows you to laugh at people trying unsuccessfully to break into trucks, it’s still not what I’m waiting for. Not even close.

I’m waiting for the day when we have a Grand Theft Auto-esque driving simulator of the real world. I love GTA, and not just for sniping civilians. Actually, the violence is rather stupid. I’d much rather just drive around the city all day. And this is exactly what I do: I grab a car and cruise around. And that’s it. I’ve beaten a few of the GTA’s, but I’ve easily spent three times as much time in the game just driving. I get to do things I can’t do in real life, such as run stop signs and drive on golf courses. And run people over.

It doesn’t even have to have fantasy physics. It could be like Microsoft Flight Simulator for driving; I don’t care. (Better yet, you can select between the two, or even tweak the values for your own entertainment. Want to drive with Moon gravity? Done.) I want to drive a hundred miles an hour past a virtual representation of my house. I want to do speed runs of my commute, cutting through back yards and ramping off conveniently placed vehicular transport trucks, double parked in such a way as to allow me to finish by landing on top of the building where I work.

I really hope this will happen. I don’t want to go out on a limb and predict this for the future, lest I be wrong. But there’re two things that will determine whether or not this happens, and that’s whether or not there’s anyone else out there who wants to see this happen, as well as how likely it is that all the necessary information will be collected. It might not be practical from a “capture every single building on every single street and match this up with height information calculated from satellite photos” standpoint. Google maps, for instance, still does not have a satellite photo of my house, much less street-level information. It could be that this happens only in major cities while the other 97% of the country remains unmapped. On the other hand, maybe the goal is to cover everyone, eventually. I suspect that if the drivable maps do come to fruition, they’ll be of lower fidelity outside cities. There’s also the difficulty of adding trees and detail, correct textures, and interactive objects like road signs; without these things it’s just a bunch of house-colored boxes that you drive around.

One solution to this could be to create a sort of wikipedia model for interactive 3D maps. Google already has that 3D building thing in place which, I think, you can add buildings you’ve made. If they move to a 3D drivable map, they could implement the same wiki-ified collaboration: if you’re familiar with the area, you can go in and place road signs, trees, cats, etc. with more detail than can be gleaned from the photos alone. If everyone did their own house (which they all look up out of curiosity anyway), you’d have a super-detailed, very interactive environment.

Marry that with a good physics model and maybe throw in a little of Electronic Arts’ Need For Speed: Pimp My Ride action going on, then script some missions involving terrorist plots, or reenact real life scenarios like chasing down a white Ford Bronco and maybe throw in a little multiplayer action and there you go.

It would pretty much be the last computer game I’d ever need.

-Ted