Slashdot Mirror
The Thin Line Between Reality and Video Games
Boomzilla writes "San Jose Mercury news is carrying an article about a 2-year-old Silicon Valley start-up called Keyhole and their product Earthviewer. The Mountain View company makes interactive 3-D maps that fuse high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery, elevation data, GPS coordinates, and overlay information about cities and businesses to deliver a streaming, 3D map of the entire globe. Since the start of the war, many news networks have been using the maps to zoom in on, over and around the Iraqi landscape to help viewers see where the war is being fought. Keyhole is financed by Sony Broadband Entertainment, graphics-chip maker Nvidia and others. Keyhole uses satellite images, aerial photos and other data to create 3-D maps that perform much like high-quality video games. Way cool!"
I've downloaded the trial twice in the last couple years (this has been around for quite a while now), and as far as I can tell the only 3D things in the software are the giant sphere that makes the earth and the video card required to run it. In the trial version, at least, there is no eleveation mapping or anything else. It is just flat photos pasted on a spherical Earth. It is pretty cool though, being able to pan and scan from one city to another smoothly. Really cool, but a little lacking in the 3D department.
the site seems not to be giving out earthviewer demo accounts but you can still download this if your a nvidia user.
r /E arthviewerNVWeb.exe
http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/EarthViewe
http://www.avatar-me.com/
I don't see why this is scary. Playing games in familiar places is fun. I'm planning a map (not for UT) of the area I live in for that reason.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I'm glad to see that someone is finally putting high resolution map pan/zoom apps into the market, the technology has been available for awhile and continues to get cheaper. Silicon Graphics used to demonstrate a similar application years ago to promote their InfiniteReality graphics engine... they had ~500 GB of earth texure data on a massive disk array and were able to zoom down to 0.125m (aerial photo) resolution in a few cities. All realtime and at almost any speed. Butter-smooth. Crazy cool. The most impressive (or nauseating!) demo was the moon-to-DisneyWorld bungie jump, which made the audience gasp and the RAID grind like mad. These days I've heard their texure database is large and now even has elevation/terrain data. I'd love to see what the IR4 can do!
On the PC side of things I would imagine this is now possible on a much smaller budget. High-end PCs finally have the gfx and I/O thruput (8x AGP and PCI-X, for example) to pipe the texture data fast enough.
Keep blurring that line, it makes the games more impressive and gives even more possibilities for real world applications.
It's no secret where their data comes from. The details of who Keyhole licensed imagery from (Space Image, AirPhoto USA etc.) can all be found by digging around on their site.
As for elevation, you're correct that SRTM isn't usable yet. Keyhole simply doesn't have better than the usual free 1km elevation data outside the USA. And 1km looks as bad as you might think.
For those who care, see the review of EarthViewer 3D that i wrote last year. I don't believe much has changed except the price dropping in desperation.
EarthViewer is built on Intrinsic Graphics' Alchemy, a 3D gaming API that is used by a number of game developers for PC and console games. AFAIK, EarthViewer predated the NVidia promotion by a year or so (though I didn't buy it until the $79/year NVidia version came out).
This has been around for quite a while. There are two versions to download, an nvidia specific one, and one that works with any video card. But the only difference I can see is that the nvidia specific version has the nvidia logo on the corner.
The level of detail varies with the region. The last time I checked out the program like a year ago it had extremely detailed maps for most regions of the US, Japan, and Afghanistan. The maps weren't updated in real time though.
Fritz, your comments are pretty insightful, but not totally on the money. Quake engines are optimized for some things, like culling and sorting of polygons for indoor environment. And flight sims can make certain optimizations, like knowing you can't go faster than X and all the data is on your hard disk (as opposed to downloaded in realtime). If you were to see a version of earthviewer (which I have) that was running off a full local cache of data, you'd see that it's way beyond current flight sims and Quake in performance and visual quality. And given the limitations of serving terrabytes of content over the internet, the consumer version still holds up pretty well, IMO. There are certain things you can do in the consumer version that _will_ show this off, such as increasing the texture size and using anisotropic filtering.
BTW, I do not speak for the company. My comments are all my own.