[ExI] idea for empty warehouses

[spike]

Perhaps some of you virtual reality hipsters have some ideas.

 

Many if not most US metropolitan areas are interspersed with huge warehouses
that gradually became more empty as most American manufacturing was exported
to China.  Enormous Chinese container ships became de facto warehouses, as
we perfected just-in-time delivery to our big-box stores.  These empty
warehouses create a new opportunity for fun and profit.  

 

We also saw an important transition as data storage went way more compact.
Engineering offices once needed a drawing board, several filing cabinets,
some means of cataloging the filing cabinets, often a big wooden card
catalog like we used to see in the public library in our misspent youth
(remember those things?), a big locking wooden desk if you were a bigshot or
a smaller metal desk otherwise.  All this stuff took a lot of space.  But
now your computer is your drawing board, your filing cabinets, your card
catalog, your calendar, your secretary, your draftsman, and a desk isn't
really necessary if your computer weighs 2 kg.  After we mostly went
paperless in the early 00s, we got rid of that bulky junk and the excess
employees, so we easily fit four engineers into the office space that once
held one.  This allowed Lockheeed Sunnyvale to sell of most of its really
valuable real estate to the local internet fly-by-nights.  That's why it is
now about a fifth the area it was 20 yrs ago.  This transition must have
happened elsewhere as well, vacating so many enormous office buildings.

 

Now we have all these unused warehouses and empty office buildings in metro
areas which no one knows how to employ.  They really are everywhere, and
they are not difficult to spot.  We call them see-throughs, because you
drive by on the freeway, see a huge office building and everything behind
it.  Many of the warehouses have no cars parked anywhere near them, so they
must be empty as well.

 

Here's the idea: we use google glass to create something like a meat-world
quasi-real version of the virtual reality game Second Life.  We could use VR
hoods or goggles to dress up a big empty room as whatever the participant
likes best, as they walk around in a climate-controlled environment.  It can
be a field of flowers for instance, or a Mario Brothers world with chompy
plants and Yoshis running about, or perhaps a big virtual Disneyland for the
younger set.  The players could perceive a garden of Eden as they walk
around observing delights such as the tree of life, serpents offering fruit,
nekkid Eves and so forth. Oh that would be so trippy.

 

Big multi-floor office buildings could be arranged so that floors have
common themes and interacting players.  If other office buildings are like
the ones I know, the periphery of each floor are private offices with a
door, what we used to call four-walls and a lid which you could aspire to
inhabit, these always reserved for the big shots and higher ranking players.
These could be converted into rooms for copulation for those players who
successfully negotiate that particular interaction.

 

Oh my, there is money to be made here, waaaay big money.

 

spike

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