Watchdogs, the upcoming next-gen console and PC title from Ubisoft, is all about moving around in and manipulating a heavily interconnected world of smartphones, cameras and local networks – all ripe for the invading. To show how non-fictional that upcoming reality is, Ubisoft has now launched the WeAreData website and it's quite surprising how like Watchdogs our contemporary cities are.
At the moment you can view Paris, London and Berlin, which when zoomed out, don't look like anything too special, but once you get down to a more localised area, the amount of information is impressive. There's listings for mobile phone coverage, traffic light controls, tweets and Flickr image placements, public toilets, ATM machines – all of them linked through interconnected systems.
Really. Have a look for yourself: http://wearedata.watchdogs.com/
You can even see what everyone else is looking at in the bottom right.
There's also data on crime rates, unemployment figures and the amount of local electricity consumption.
“Watch_Dogs WeareData gathers available geolocated data in a non-exhaustive way: we only display the information for which we have been given the authorization by the sources,” reads the site's blurb. “Yet, it is already a huge amount of data. You may even watch what other users are looking at on the website through Facebook connect.”
There's a lot of data here, even if it's not to the extent that Watchdogs is, but it doesn't take much imagination to see that we're heading in a direction that could allow for some of the exploits seen in the game to become a reality.
Kitguru Says: The foreboding music makes it doubly creepy.
[Thanks AllGamesBeta]