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:

Hiro turns his attention to Earth. The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity... It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems—vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans—and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator—the line between night and day—has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the west.

Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East Coast.

Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse. He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down on a solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit.

Sound familiar? It turns out that Snow Crash was an impressive forecaster of things to come, especially when one considers the fact that Google Earth (or Keyhole, as it was original called) was not introduced until in 2001 - a full nine years after the novel was published. Despite this, however, Google Earth and Bing Maps have not yet been able to realize one important aspect of the "Earth" application in Snow Craft. You simply cannot zoom into a Google Earth map and see satellites floating in space in their real-time orbits, actual weather and cloud patterns, or the real-time locations of car, people or a flock of birds. The technology simply has not caught up yet with Stephenson's more ubiquitous and pervasive vision of mapping.

Or has it...?

Georgia Tech Research Finally Realizes the Snow Crash Vision

Researchers from Georgia Tech have recently developed methods to take real-time information obtained from live video feeds, and display them in Google Earth, as photo-realistic, moving 3D objects. So far, the technology has been used for a wide range of impressive and thought-provoking demonstrations, including:

• Direct mapping of a group of pedestrians walking down a street in Google Earth, based on video capture.
• Real-time re-creation of a college football game in Google Earth, using multiple video camera angles.
• Extrapolation of vehicular motion throughout an entire stretch of road from just a few spotty camera angles, to create an accurate representation of traffic patterns on the highway.
• Video driver synthesis of photo-realistic clouds within the Google Earth environment, based on actual cloud formations, captured on film.

Still not impressed? Just check out the video below:

So, Are We Looking at the Future of Google Earth?

If these techniques are adopted by Google Earth and Bing Maps in the near future, the implications for real-time mapping technology are staggering. Just consider how widespread and inexpensive the cost of video is these days - there's a camera in every laptop, on the roof of most non-residential buildings and on the traffic signals and highway overpasses everywhere. Apparently, the research team's future plans also include the addition of weather, birds, and motion in rivers and stream.

Now, it's starting to sound a LOT more like Snow Crash.