When I read the entry on O’Reilly Radar (Link) that Google had acquired the rights to the technology used by the Stanford team to win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, the first thing that ran through my mind was that they could use swarms of autonomous aerial vehicles (or “swarmanoids” – reLink) that might look something like the police drones now being used in the UK. Sure sounds like my earlier disappointment, that the swarmanoids had no links to virtual worlds, might now be reversed. From the O’Reilly post:
The technology will enable Google to map out photo-realistic 3-D versions of cities around the world, and possibly regain ground it has lost to Microsoft’s 3-D mapping application known as Virtual Earth.
My second thought was of a Clock DVA song called “Voice Recognition Test” with the following line:
We try to encode the world;
Decode it and record it
On our machines.
I wonder, at what point – if any – will our efforts to encode our world allow us to see the diseases plaguing it with sufficiently high resolution that we feel compelled to act?
Filed under: architecture, space/place, technology
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