It brings up the topic of the future of technology. I feel like it won't be long before the entire Earth is rendered. As of today, there exist photo-realistic environments that are the sizes of states. The thing is, right now they are fictional environments dreamt up by programmers and developers. How much farther away is our world from these 3D environments? Not far at all.
Imagine this. Click on a program, up pops the Earth in globe form. Rotate the Earth to say, west of the US... zoom in on Hawaii. Choose the beach on the west side of that remote looking island. Zoom in further and...
Minus the gun, of course. Walk around, check out the wild life, and go for a helicopter ride. This is a screenshot taken from a game... yes, you spend the entire game walking around this beautiful tropical island and interacting with stuff (mainly shooting things).
But what about, say Baltimore? Every sidewalk, wallpaper, and graffiti mark documented and rendered into something as virtually realistic as the pic above. Crazy, eh? Not too far away, I say.
That's enough out of me, enjoy another screenshot from that game (Farcry - where you're supposed to shoot stuff, but you'd much rather sit and stare at the sky):
2 comments:
Not until we have the hardware and software completely automated. The lag would probably occur in the AI. That part seems a bit far off, I think.
This is quite an old post.
Just wanna update that gaming has gone one step further, although not very significat.
"Test Drive Unlimited" is a driving game which basically involves driving around in Hawaii (Oahu island). It contains a GPS Map which is identical to Google Earth. Although it is not the real Google Earth, its a replica which contains real places in it.
I could search a city name in Google Earth, and drive to it in the game. The level of map detail in the game is obviously much lesser, you cant build everything in simulation.
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