It would be so cool to use Microsoft's "earth copy" for stuff other than just flight sim. They say it's the most accurate representation of the earth ever. Wonder if you can do some interesting science with that.
There's also some crazy errors that are visible from the air, like many rivers being raised up hundreds of feet[0], and many bridges being solid underneath[1].
I always assumed one of primary things in a sequel would be to train an even bigger and better satellite maps -> 3D scenery model, especially one that understood a wider (and better-localized) variety of building configurations, so we'll see.
[0] https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/river-altitude-raised-w...
[1] https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/fix-photogrammetry-brid...
99% of that engine value is procedural terrain and graphical shaders. It looks great but has no scientifical value.
Just like the "digital twin" hype train, cool simulations have fancy graphics, useful simulations don't.
This was the prevailing wisdom in AI before generalized transformers as well. We're rapidly moving toward black box hyperintelligent AGI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Loc...
We approached Microsoft when we were selling the company, and the response we got was "you're too close to work we're doing for us to even look at you or talk to you". I assumed that meant they are building out a digital twin, with capabilities to run in a browser at high speed with high resolution (which we did). That was 3 years ago. I'm surprised we haven't seen something from them yet.
After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dangerous jumps).
It's 2.5D, I used a 3D engine but the graphics are just satellite imagery projected on to a terrain map.
And an amazing resource for organizing street racing or any other event where knowledge of average police response times might be useful. Playtesting exactly how one can best evade pursuing police on realworld streets would be very fun.
Some people would buy boats, private planes, art, ... I would hire a team to replicate my child neighbourhood perfectly in a gran turismo or preferably GTA 5 engine lol. You'd get pretty far with a million USD in the modding community