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 was watching CNN today, and got a little worried when I realised I was pressing fire on my gamepad.
...with comparing reality and video games? It has nothing to do with video games.
That makes the who story pointless.
Jason
ProfQuotes
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.
They meant the interface. It's far more fluid then static images on a database.
But that having been said, how hard would it be to add orbital defense satellites. Anyone up for a game of missile command 2k3?
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
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
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.
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).
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.
Despite best efforts, slabs of raw data will be out of date. Details such as the exact form of foliage would have to be filled in by an 'educated guess'. Are sensitive military facilities accurately mapped?
What indication is there to the user that the information they are viewing may not be completely accurate? How can a user judge the accuracy of each part of the scene they are viewing?
I see a danger that ultra-realistic, inaccurate, renderings may widely replace real world observations, leading to a reduction in available information, even though the volume of misinformation has increased.
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.
Yesterday, I put it on the car CD player and accidentally ran down a moped and three pedestrians before I realised I wasn't playing the game.