BP Oil Spill Gets Unreal: Developer Visualizes Size Of Catastrophe With UDK

by Matt on June 21, 2010

Sometimes, numbers don’t just don’t tell the whole story. For example, when you tell me that the diameter of the Milky Way is 6×10¹⁷ miles, I smile and nod and generally pretend that that number means more to me than a block of Swiss cheese. But it doesn’t, really. It’s just too big.

Likewise, when we read that the BP oil spill ravaging the Gulf may be spewing as much as 4.2 million gallons of oil into the ocean every day, the mind struggles to comprehend. Numbers with that many zeros somehow short-circuit our visual and spatial reasoning hardware.

So what can we do to ameliorate this situation? To one anonymous developer, the answer was clear: create a digital tower of 25,000 oil barrels, fly up to the top, and knock them all down.

And so he did. Using the popular Unreal Development Kit (UDK), an unnamed dev crafted a 4-pillared tower of oil barrels measuring (if he got the dimensions right) over 15 miles high, and then gave it a little nudge. He (or she) kindly captured the resulting carnage on YouTube, and, via the magikz of the interwebz, I’ve reproduced it below for your viewing pleasure.

Game on.