The writer Jose Luis Borges once imagined a map as large as the empire it mapped -- a map that was quickly discarded as useless. Now researchers at Canada's Carleton University CIMS Lab have recreated ten city blocks of Montreal's historic Saint-Laurent Boulevard in life-size, ultra-high-definition 3D imagery. But their map isn't useless at all.

The simulated streetscape is detailed down to the mortar between the bricks and the rust on steel columns. Visitors to it are immersed in the street and can move back and forth, walk from building to building and zoom in on the high-definition replica to see image details beyond the capacity of the naked eye.

But the simulation does much more than wow viewers. The project demonstrated advanced visualization and networking technologies that can be used for many other purposes -- reconstructing regions that have been devastated by natural disasters, collaborating securely on engineering projects, rehearsing emergency scenarios in nuclear power plants before they are built, planning for battles in simulated combat areas, making real-time changes in housing designs after "walking through" the plans, creating life-size gaming experiences, experiencing real-time Olympic events or car races in a life-size, immersive environment... the list is endless.

The researchers used IBM’s Deep Computing Visualization technology over Canada's high-speed research network, CA*net 4, to create the simulation.