Obelisk Bug Found in Microsoft Flight Simulator Due to a Student's Typo
In the list of typos with extreme relevance to the world, this one doesn't register unless it's at the "comical" side of the scale, but it's interesting, nevertheless, to look into. Recent reports on the recently-released Microsoft Flight Simulator mentioned the existence of an eldritch-esque obelisk in the in-game representation of Australia. This obelisk was nothing more than a 212-story building, which became a visual skyscraper, the top of which where particularly gifted flight simulator pilots managed to land on.
While one could think of this as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke or as a manifest of Robert Silverberg's Tower of Glass, the truth, as always, follows Occam's Razor. Microsoft Simulator makes use of OpenStreetMap data for its Bing Maps service, which runs on Microsoft's Azure servers. The integration of OpenStreetMap featured a bug on that particular building that was introduced, as has been discovered, by Nathan Wright, a university student who, as part of his degree work last year, made an edit to that particular building's specifications. A 2 became 212, and thus the tower was born and manifested in-game. Other bugs have been found in-game, but some of them defy skepticism: turning Buckingham Palace into an office building seems like a particularly snobbish way of criticizing Britain's royalty. As a particular Disney and Pixar character would say, "Coincidence? I Think not!".
While one could think of this as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke or as a manifest of Robert Silverberg's Tower of Glass, the truth, as always, follows Occam's Razor. Microsoft Simulator makes use of OpenStreetMap data for its Bing Maps service, which runs on Microsoft's Azure servers. The integration of OpenStreetMap featured a bug on that particular building that was introduced, as has been discovered, by Nathan Wright, a university student who, as part of his degree work last year, made an edit to that particular building's specifications. A 2 became 212, and thus the tower was born and manifested in-game. Other bugs have been found in-game, but some of them defy skepticism: turning Buckingham Palace into an office building seems like a particularly snobbish way of criticizing Britain's royalty. As a particular Disney and Pixar character would say, "Coincidence? I Think not!".
