The Snug

/geeky techy gamer mode FULLY engaged

Flying over some downloaded scenery of Toronto in FS2004 (in preperation for my flight next week) got me thinking about the accuracy of world data and how to tackle the collation of it.

At the moment the choices for building up gaming worlds are aerial photography, satellite imagery, GPS and ground photography. All of these are expensive and have pretty much reached their limits or are close to doing so (as a quick view of Google Maps will demonstrate), but why should this be the case? Why can't we build such databases for nothing?

Can we make a better virtual world without having to resort to sending out teams of expensive digital photographers and geo-survey specialists? I think we can.

In January this year, a digital camera with GPS was launched. This camera automatically makes notes of exactly where on the earth it was located when it took a said picture. As Google tells us, the wifi camera is here too, enabling transfer of photos to PCs without that cumbersome cabling. The natural progression of wifi cameras would indicate that your pictures could upload themselves automatically to a storage area of your choosing as soon as you walk through a "Wifi hotspot".

Could we ever link these two technologies and start building an automatic database of every location on earth? If the camera knows where it was when it took a picture, which way it was facing and the lens length at the time of the taking, isn't it only a matter of time before someone generates a routine to automatically meld this information and start creating a hugely detailed picture of the earth that could be used by cartologists, routefinders, scientists and even gamesmakers? In the same way as basic panorama software lets me create pictures like this out of multiple snaps, without any intervention, I envisage something creating automatic versions of this on a worldwide scale.

It might just be a pipe dream, but hey, it's nice to dream every once in a while :-)

/geeky techy gamer mode disengaged