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September 7, 2005

GTA: Business Trip

In which I recognize a major U.S. city from a video game (and subsequently imagine throttling my cab into oncoming traffic).

Headed to San Francisco for a day trip last week -- tiptoe in, tiptoe out, like a cat, one might say. The travel was incident-free, the meeting was interesting (and mercifully painless for the rookie) and the general situation very agreeable. All in all, it was a cool little trip.

Without tipping my hand too much, am I allowed to admit things like "I recognized buildings and geography from the back seat of my cab because of my fondness for GTA: San Andreas?" The road in question is apparently a pretty major one (Embarcadero) and in the game I really enjoyed using it as a test track for pulling into oncoming traffic at high speeds.

I'd been to San Francisco a bunch of times. Seen tons of photos of it. Driven through it in rental cars. And yet it never seemed as familiar as it did from the back of that cab last week -- when I recognized it from a goofy video game.

And that's when it all clicked for me: there's a very good reason why all the big online players are investing so heavily in these mapping services. (In case you don't follow this sort of thing, haven't downloaded Google Earth or checked out MSN Virtual Earth, click here and check it out.) That is, there really might be significant value in having a really robust digital simulacrum of the physcial world (beyond "it's kind of cool and helps me find things").

I'll admit that I thought the maps thing was something between a fad and the arms race between the online portals. Yeah, neato, it puts a little marker down on the map where my house is. And, oh wait, it goes and ZOOOOOOOOMS way into the air and then back down again when I type in something else? That's amazing. And all I have to do is download some lousy friggin client to do that? That's all? If anything, I was jealous of the clever folks that sold off their mapping companies and ideas to the portals. (NB: it looks like a very good time to develop a "must-have" web app and sell your company to a portal. They need to spend that $4B on something. But I digress.)

But I think I now get the vision thing a bit more. Sure, the maps will make local search a lot snazzier, but the applications hardly end there. Without nerding out too much, you can see that there are a ton of nifty things you can do with a full-scale digital representation of a city. Lots of commerce, lots of education, and tons of entertainment. (Aight, I'll nerd out now: how cool would it be to be able to play your favorite first-person shooter on your own street? In front of your office? In the backyard of the house where you grew up?) Even better, you could open-source or wiki the whole thing and let the locals be responsible for the upkeep of the digital space that represents their actual home. And pretty soon, you can see how you've gone from a map of the nearest Taco Bell franchises to the metaverse from Snow Crash.

(Also, it made me want to go look for the parachute.)

Posted by thatkid at September 7, 2005 9:42 PM under Biznass

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