When the dead come back to life to feast on the living, will you be prepared? Will you have guns? Food? A map?  Didn’t think so. Thankfully, a new digital service aims to help you navigate the zombie-infested streets should such a nightmare scenario occur.  “Map of the Dead,” created by the digital agency Doejo, quickly shows survivors services that would be most helpful should the dead start to rise, such as gun stores, supermarkets and radio towers (to call for help).  The site mines Google‘s map data to come up with an array of color-coded icons to aid the living.  “All the data’s through Google,” says Jeff Merrick, the Doejo designer behind the project. “First, I used the places API. They have pre-set place types for things like hospitals and campgrounds. The second method is through keyword searches for things they don’t have categories for, like gun stores.”  Besides the obvious services, the map also points out places to avoid, like hospitals and police stations, which are likely to be overrun with zombies. The map even color-codes regions as safe or dangerous, though the definition is pretty broad: If a region has any man-made structures, it’s a danger zone.  “If it’s marked as a man-made structure it’s red,” says Merrick. “I’m not sure how they actually define that. It just looks cool. That also results in some weirdness in Alaska. If you look at the lower part of Alaska, it’s a big red area.”  Originally, Merrick says he wanted to overlay real population density data, to emphasize the increased danger of zombies in places with more people, but he found it unworkable.  “I had trouble finding good data on that to use,” he says. “But I got basically the same effect by using the man-made structures.”  This isn’t the first time a clever developer has used Google Maps data to enhance the narrative of a Zombie Apocalypse. A couple of years ago, someone put the events of The Walking Dead comic book series into a special Google Map.  What do you think of the Map of the Dead? And how could it be improved? Share your thoughts in the comments.
A new map compiles location-based data to find the most useful resources should the dead rise to kill the living.