Cobb: Massive Matrix Representation

December 06, 2003

Massive Matrix Representation

I didn't know about the Castle at Edinburgh. I had no idea how massive the bridges over the Moscow River are or how impressive the Kremlin could be. If you would have told me that the Duomo in Florence is very much like the one in Milan, I wouldn't have guessed. Nor did I realize how close the hills are to downtown Hong Kong. I know these things now because of a video game.

Project Gotham Racing 2 is the hottest thing right now on XBox Live. And that's all good for its own reasons, but I want to speculate out loud about what we're going to be doing in 10 years.

We are going to have a map of the world and we are going to have Matrix-like avatars of ourselves. We are going to drive fast virtual cars and take virtual walking tours and we're going to see the world. But that's just the start.

Imagine that you take a picture of your house and then upload it to the world-map project. If you think blogging breaks it down, wait until you can talk in realtime to somebody who is giving you a virtual tour through their neighborhood. This is much more likely to propagate through the gaming classes first, but that's a lot more people than are currently blogging.

Somewhere out there are programmers who know how huge this can be. I wonder what they are thinking about building to make this happen. About the same time that I found out about Friendster, there was another experimental site going up along this concept, but I didn't have the horsepower on my laptop to support the app.

I also want to mention War TV, which is also going to be part of the new mediasphere. You guessed it. Armed conflict, 24/7. Reality TV with combatants. It won't be done by journalists as we know them, but rather by amatuers who will be able to sell video on open media markets.

Posted by mbowen at December 6, 2003 01:10 AM

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Comments

God help us.

Posted by: jason at December 6, 2003 02:51 AM

Reminds me a little of Stephenson's Snow Crash. BTW, I understand True Crime LA mapped much of the city pretty well.

Posted by: alex at December 6, 2003 09:24 AM

Damn. Now I'm going to have to read Snow Crash.

Yes, I played True Crime. Great game.

Posted by: Cobb at December 6, 2003 10:08 AM

How'd you read Cryptonomicon and not Snow Crash?

Posted by: P6 at December 7, 2003 05:53 AM