If an alternate reality game forcing you to run away from vicious hordes of the undead in order to burn calories and survive a bit long (in the game and real life, I suppose) isn’t enough to quench your thirst for undead action, here’s another brain-eating form of augmented reality for you:

“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.”

Keep in mind that people already put in the time to transfer The Walking Dead into a google map, not to mention the pre-app instruction manual The Zombie Survival Guide. What’s particularly clever about these apps, the article notes, is how they use real-world map “data to enhance the narrative of a Zombie Apocalypse,” leading me to wonder if there’s anything that’s interesting anymore without zombies somehow attached to it.   

[via Mashable]