Over at Slashdot, there’s a post about a new mash-up:
“The BBC is reporting that a Californian company has created software that can layer relevant recorded sounds over locations in Google Earth.”
But here’s the thing:
The analog to the high resolution images of the real earth would be to layer those images with the actual ambient sounds of the same location. I mean live, real sound.
In fact, I’d go further an say that what I want is a tool that layers the actual ambient sound of a location as it would sound from the scaled distance that location is zoomed to. I mean, if I’m zoomed so that the image appears to be couple hundred feet in the air, then I should be able to see and hear a location as that location would be heard from 100 feet in the air.
So, some company need to wire into all those spy and surveilance cameras all over the globe and add those sounds to the visual environment of Google Earth.
Also, I want a “police scanner” option that automatically pans to loud sounds at some surface distance setting. So, if I’m hanging out I want the app to zoom and pan to nearby shouts or other loud noises, and then continue to play the current ambient sound of that location after panning there.
Now, if that’s not an argument for broad implementation of multicast, or for Google to finally use all that dark fibre in order to transmit audio data …
And then, I want Maxis to use the simcity engine to model buildings, people and cars using the same visual and audio data …