Emergency Response
Augmented Reality and Google Earth - Is This "Snow Crash" Realized?
How Snow Crash Changed the Future of Mapping
For anyone who has ever read the 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash, it is easy to appreciate how closely real life can sometimes imitates art. Never mind the parallels between Stephenson's "Metaverse" and the popular online game "Second Life" - that's a blog discussion for another day. I want to focus instead on examining how closely today's Google Earth and Microsoft's Bing Map (formerly Virtual Earth) emulate the "Earth" application in Snow Crash". Consider the following excerpt from Chapter 13 of the book:
America's Infrastructure Receives an Overall D Grade in 2009
On January 28, 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) published the 2009 Infrastructure Report Card for the United States. The Report Card is an assessment by professional engineers of the nation's status in 15 categories of infrastructure. The report cards is as follows:
Introducing the Advanced-Infrastructure Toolbox
Overview and History
From the time ancient humans first abandoned their nomadic ways and began to construct permanent shelters, society and individual quality-of-life have been both bound and enhanced by the technical proficiency of civil engineers---their ability to invent and apply tools and technologies as new challenges arose. During the course of history, these engineering tools naturally evolved from the groma used for surveying
roads in ancient Rome, to the slide rules that helped humans land on the Moon, to the spreadsheets and computer-aided-drafting tools used by civil engineers today. As a result, the Civil Engineering Toolbox of this generation is vastly different than the toolbox of my grandfather's generation.
About Advanced-Infrastructure.com
Welcome to Advanced-Infrastructure.com - an online community of engineering professionals, researchers and others interested in the promotion of advanced computing, sensing and continuous state monitoring and proactive decision support technologies to help address our long-term civil engineering and infrastructure management needs.
