Grand Theft Auto: Your Town

I had this idea in the shower this morning. I expect some version of it is already happening, so in sharing it I’m hoping somebody might point me to the appropriate projects. As you may know, the popular video game Grand Theft Auto is quite a franchise. They continue to set new games and expansion packs in different cities.

Imagine if you could play Grand Theft Auto (or any similarly urban game) set in your town, where your town is any settlement on the planet with more than, say, 5000 people. Here’s how I think it would work:

There’s a big trend in encoding the world through GPS. Geocaching, the Degree Confluence Project, and so on are all interesting examples of our collective need to represent our real world digitally.

Somebody develops some software that enables the average human to describe a building using a digital camera and a GPS device. The software has to be simple enough for any techophobe to use, and should enable people to generate a decent 3-D rendered model of the exterior of a building, buildings or city block. Basically, you’d input GPS data about the building, and then wrap images of the building onto a wire frame. More skilled volunteer project managers in each city would tweak the renders to make them look decent.

People work collectively, building a replica of their downtown. Ideally, each participant renders the block or blocks around where they live. Because they’re familiar with these urban spaces, they can provide the highest level of detail and insight into the area.

Rockstar Games, the makers of Grand Theft Auto, provides an API into their games. This enables people to associate game events and locations with any city map. In the original game, say a major sequence occurs in Central Park. Why can’t it occur in Stanley Park or Golden Gate Park instead? Indoor sequences are associated with appropriate buildings. There may be some fudging here, but as the grass roots game-modding community has proven, that’s okay.

Obviously there would be plenty of hurdles–social and technological–to overcome to make this work, but I like the concept. An open-source, detailed rendition of your city is a great resource, and has applications far beyond gaming. Virtual tourism (yeah, right), historical archives, education, mapping–there’s no end to the virtual world fun that could be had. Imagine being lost in a foreign city, taking a digital photo and plugging it into the PalmPilot. Software compares your photo to the city database, and tells you not only what corner you’re on, but what direction you’re facing.