Melbourne’s giant virtual obelisk.
Microsoft Flight Simulator players spotted a giant mountain-high obelisk in Australia this week. While Flight Simulator has done a great job at recreating the real world, this unusually huge structure doesn’t exist in real life. Players have now discovered that its existence stems from a simple typo.
University student Nathan Wright made an edit to OpenStreetMap data for part of his degree work last year, adding more than two hundred stories to a building that’s actually just two stories. Wright meant to type 2, but instead he typed 212 in the data section for floors. “I think it’s so funny as it was the first time I was using OpenStreetMap,” says Wright in an email to The Verge. “I was using it for a university task and had to add data…