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!"
Earthviewer.com is 2 years old and has nothing to do with gaming, its purpose is merely to serve as a showcase for Nvidia's cards
Slightly offtopic, but i heard about some guys who obtained blueprints and made a UT map of their high school. Kinda scary, but i guess its better than the real thing.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
the site had to yank the trial version, since many news agency's were to cheap to actually purchase it.
The original concept of the game designer was to offer GIS-detailed maps for the 50 mile x 50 mile area around the main game sites. With the software he is using to create the maps, he can produce
Player : GM, can we see that [mountain | cave | valley | battlefield] from here?
GM : Let me fire up the map viewer, and then you can answer that question for yourself.
Imagine being able to see maps and "dragon's eye views" of different areas of a gaming map. The idea sounds neat, and I think that he is going into playtesting.
Some crackpots have theories that god plays videogames that we are characters in. If so, then now we get to see what his monitor looks like!
But what does the load screen look like then?
So who else thought "Someone has gone and made the 'Earth' program out of Snow Crash", when they first saw the article?
Then again, the software has been around for a while. I wonder if the people who wrote it got the idea out of Snow Crash?
All I wanna know is, where is Hiro, and who is playing the part of Raven?
I had this software on my system, maybe 2 weeks (ok a month because thats how long the free trial lasts)
The images produced are amazing, but after you get through seeing your house, grandma's house, cousins house, freinds houses, your work, all from the air it kind of get's boring.
The user level version produces some good maps, but if you're really interested in earthviewer, you should sign up for the corporate trial. Even though all the images produced from the corporate trial have a watermark of keyholes logo on them, the detail is just too good to pass up.
I played with Earthviewer about a year ago, and it's definitely cool, but I think you'd have to change it too fundamentally to get it to work with gaming. Quake engines and such are really much more optimized for presenting textures in the fast real time need for games, and Flight Sim already does some this style of progressive resolution depending on your point of view and zoom level.
For me the real difference is how well it integrates with huge databases. It seems as though Keyhole's strength is in being what they call a "streaming geospatial browser." A potential front end for every database with topographical hooks. A big (waay big) market in situations where visual representation of that data is important.
I'd like to hear more input on the "eye candy" arguement though - that being able to visually browse this data has limited value when compared to the cost of enabling it with the viewer. TV and flyovers are cool, but are there concrete applications where this style of presentation will help people get insight into data? Remember that we can still look at large data sets in 2D and in static 3D - does it help to be able to fly over it and zoom down in real time?
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Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
Oh, you mean the PC gaming scene. I enjoy Rez, Mario Party 4, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Xenosaga, Shenmue 2, etc, very much, thanks.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
FYI the US spy satellite range is the Keyhole Series. Has been taking pictures of our earth for more than 30 years.
Tho a lot isnt know about current generation (or even the past 2 generations), the US has released older footage.
They've been using Earthviewer on CNN several times a day in the last few days. The current version of the client supports elevation data, USA yellow page searches (show me all the Taco Bells), street address searching, and cool image overlays that are being used on http://bbs.earthviewer.com to show weather, archeology, and battle movements in Iraq.
With the elevation data its very much 3D, but most man-made structures don't register (except Hoover dam).
Both skylinesoft.com, and before them mobilemaps.com have worked on something similar. The mobilemaps 3D viewer was available in 1996! It was at VGA resolution, fit in 640K, and ran a lightening speed fractal landscape engine, along with web hyperlinks.
3D maps is an interesting market, because users expect reality from these maps and do not understand the limitations of the data, and why it doesn't look like real-life. One interesting application mobilemaps tried was mapping ski resorts, which attracted reasonable interest.
Mobilemaps, has since moved away from 3D maps to focus on providing an open-source search & locate engine that can be combined with 2D or 3D maps.
so it makes fighting seem realistic...except for the dying part. no wonder people are signing up for the army like there's no tomorrow.
warning: Anecdotal evidence ahead
One of my friends joined the reserve a few months ago soon after his 18th birthday. In the past we'd frequently played realtime strategy and FPS games. He was really excited about the idea of potentially seeing combat and remarked how it would "be like playing Unreal - for real". I did try to reason with him by pointing out in "Unreal" there is no real-world consequences for failure. If you get shot, you feel no pain, you can't be taken prisoner and if you die - you can just hit the spacebar and come back.
He also liked to play the America's Army game and remarked to me how "realistic" the gameplay was. To which I replied "If it was truly realistic, you couldn't escape/exit/shut the power off to make the game go away and you wouldn't be able to try a mission you died in again. Surely, they left these elements of realism out because they'd be detrimental to the appeal of recruiting."
While I don't believe videogames can make someone who isn't inherently violent become so, I do believe they can potentially satisfy a craving for violence in those who already possess the disposition.
I originally thought violent videogames had potential to be harmful due to the inaccurate depiction of the aftermath of violence, but after talking to my friend upon his return from basic training, I realized the army basically uses the same techniques to train soldiers. During the assult course my friend went though, no one was killed or injured. He didn't see his friends drop dead at his side, he didn't get shot or have to take the life of an enemy by means of lethal force. His training was exactly like playing Unreal for real - it taught him nothing about real war.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
This is just my two cents worth, but I would point out modern video games (specifically of the Quake genre) use rather robust vector mathematic models and are basically just "physics engines" that model the basic vector mathematics of reality (i.e. spacial orientation, time progression, velocity, momentum, particle physics, lighting, etc.).
In answer to your question, this has to do with comparing reality and video games in regards to the "fact" (?) that video games are developing better physics engines, and reality is being better modeled by computer simulations, multimedia databases, etc.
Fact of the matter is that, if one wanted to, someone could program the A.I. of a smart missle with the Quake codebase; alternativly, one could easily program a video game which uses satellite photos, networked video feeds, and whatnot...
Anyhow... just my two cents...
You could use this to make a map for [insert popular network FPS such as Quake].
Not really, the resolution isn't nearly good enough for that. My house was about 15 pixels wide in earthviewer. There was a free trial at nvidia.com, I'm not sure if it's still there. Regardless of that fact, it's still an incredibly cool program. You could type in an address, and it would 'fly' to that location, downloading the pictures it needed as it went (broadband of at least 1mbit is a must for it to be useable). When it had the images cached, I could zoom in from out space to my street in 5 seconds. Very cool effect.
Of course, I wouldn't want to be on the Programming team for that... I might get smote!
A few years ago, NBC used Jane's F-15 and Fleet Command to demonstrate attacks on Iraq. And the U.S. Army uses Steel Beasts to train its tank crews (in addition to higher-end solutions).
btw, now the U.S. Army is contributing to the development of Steel Beasts 2.
We've been developing a couple of similar products for several years now. GenesisII attempts to create photorealistic images based on GIS data, and Landscape Explorer is a more traditional 'Image Overlay' product (there's also an online embedded ActiveX version). Site is at www.geomantics.com
Both these programs are intended to take a 'feed the data in and get the image' type of approach rather than the 'build your world from blocks' approach you'd get with a 3D modeller application.
With the 'Image Overlay' program this is relatively straightforward because the data is not that complex, but when you go for something more detailed and 'photorealistic' like GenesisII then complexity of the solution seems to increase exponentially with the degree of detail needed. For example modelling a mid to far distance mid-western US landscape is actually quite easy, doing it in Europe is vastly more complex because of something as apparently simple as the hedgerow and field pattern. Similarly really high mountains (Rockies, Himalaya) are easy, Mid range stuff with confirers is not too bad, but the real challenge is the English Cotswalds because of the shear complexity of a 3,000 year old mixed deciduous forest/farmed/grazed landscape.
Even with Satellite data the problems on landscape are complex. Sure I can tell it's a forest, but is it Oak or Birch? It may not matter if I'm viewing from a long shot, but closer up it does. How do I tell? get better data? (available, expense), guess (ok for games maybe, but it's not reality), or use an algorithm (you have an tree/soil/landscape distribution algorithm to hand?)
And that's before we've even considered villages and towns
I am with a student research group that makes visualizations the exact same as the earthviewer. It is incredibly easy to do. I have laughing my butt of thinking how much the news media is probably paying for these visualizations. All terrain data is from freely available DEMs and almost all the satellite images are free as well. Load these things up in a few programs, get them into Bryce, and you have CNN ready visualizations - for free! Someone tell CNN to call me!
Are sensitive military facilities accurately mapped?
When I was a cadet, the maps we used were accurate enough that individual trees in a forest were correctly represented, you could even take bearings off them for navigation (altho' if possible we used more permanent structures!). I once won an orienteering competition by literally leading my squad from tree to tree while the other squads messed around looking for traditional landmarks.
leading to a reduction in available information, even though the volume of misinformation has increased.
That's a very real problem. Observe how all the 24-hr news channels are filling their programmes with exactly the same stuff, even tho' the reality seems to be "not much has changed in the last 12 hrs".