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Fast Generation of 3D City Models
FleaPlus writes "New Scientist and UC Berkeley News report on research by Avideh Zakhor and Christian Früh on rapidly and automatically generating photo-realistic 3D models (coral cache) of city environments. This is reminiscent of research mentioned here in March, although the approach is rather different. Applications for areas like urban planning, entertainment, emergency response, and the military are discussed. Zakhor's group is also working on 4D systems, to allow for recording of events over time as moving 3D models."
The long awaited release of Sim City 5
If I remember correctly... companies like Silicon Graphics have been doing this for several years for the military using their reality center systems to analyze satellite photographs of combat zones in real time.
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This would be awesome for flight sims. If you want to view this in this in Linux here is a viewer.
Now the military can fake invasions in cities while working with the media to control us all. Cool. /removal of tin
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Excuse me.. but 'photo realistic' usually means that it is close or completly indiscernable the same as an actual photo of a real city. To be honest I've seen similar things from Sim City 2000 and see no real merit from the 'final product'. Really, how is this new? Sim City? huh? Nevermind!
http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/Berkeley .zip.torrent
Who are you and what have you done with the real Timothy?
Slashcode is smarter than you.
I've seen more realistic scenery in Flight Simulator.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
http://blackbox02.cs.washington.edu:11223/Berkeley .zip.torrent
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000960042343/
this also provides some more info on this
http://meinherz.net/
This technique should be replaced with (or combined with) LIDAR techniques. LIDAR (Light Detecting And Ranging) is like a laser version of radar, and it can be used to generate 3D maps of objects or topography fairly quickly. A LIDAR-enabled plane can do a fly-over of a city and quickly generate 3D maps. For instance, check out these LIDAR images of New York pre and post 9/11.
I've always thought that these 3D maps of cities should be combined with satellite imagery so that you could 'paint' the rooftops onto the buildings and streets. In fact, most satellite images are at a slight angle, allowing you to paint the facades of buildings. The techniques from TFA show how you could paint even more facades in the 3D model/map fairly easily. I think the LIDAR data would greatly simplify the painting algorithm, since the correct 3D shape of every object is known.
I can't wait for the day when we can browse 3D maps online of any city. It would be useful for surveyors and architects of course, but also useful for planning trips, learning geography, and so on.
For instance Picasso (in his early days) did paintings of peoples faces from different angles and with different emotions all as one face.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
Where are the crackwhores, pimps and junkies?
That, sir, is a bloody insult!
Is some big backbone route in the USA broken or is it some kind of a holiday? I hope you're not saying that people are actually spending a Saturday night out, for chrissake!
finally live action 3d pr0n!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You, I mean.
Please die. Or at least get one of those "brain" things.
I would really be impressed if they could automatically generate a 3D model of the three dimensional mess that is Lausanne:
...I claim he was just painting angular, childish drawings requiring no particular talent, and then threw some meta-artistic gloss on it.
for example
http://www.geosimcities.com/showroom_Phil.htm They were using laser to scan cityscape too.
It would be great to have this integrated to a GPS or something .. you can polan routes and tell what sort of a neighborhood a restaurant is in etc. I await the day for cameras to be equipped with GPS .. well current camera phones .. they dont write GPS data into the EXIF do they. Anyway .. integrate that tech with location and time etc. and you can have reviews of restuarants and picture or video records of neighborhoods etc. at whatever times. It would be awesome. All at the tap of one's fingers .. google is helping facilitate this with google maps .. now we need a wiki type thing to enable this sort of thing.
The problem with these techniques is there are no algorithms I know of that account for the effect of light/shadows effectively. So the textures on your objects are going to include shadows. You can notice this effect on one of the images that have linked to in the article.
http://a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp
Yahoo has been digitizing the front of buildings in major cities for some time now. It'd be great to see this imagery merged with Google's satellite view data from their KeyHole acquisition, to allow for 3d flythroughs of your favorite metropolitan area.
This could take sites like MapQuest to a new level, providing 3d photo-realistic flythroughs of your route between two locations. Sure beats reading directions!
...I can't think of anything more intelligent to say than "Damn, the next Sim City is going to be AWESOME!"
That and, as a computer animator, I can see this being very useful various CG fields.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
There now follows an ASCII representation of your genitalia (actual size when shown on a 3" monitor)
:-
Thank you.
Or was it called "4D Studio Max"? It has been a while since I abandoned the world of 4D editing, for good ol' simple 1D (top down yeah?) programming...
take these maps, and put them in a driving game. would love to drive around my city virtually.. and then get stuck in grid lock traffic in the morning ..
Now imagine sending a fleet of probes to Mars consisting of an array of satellites and ground based robots that determine and design everything necessary for perminent human habitation. Imagine taking the initiative and sending such fleets throughout the solar system to all sorts of places we will want a foothold decades before mounting such complex missions. Such a system could red flag all sorts of problems with environments that would have otherwise caused a manned crew to turn around and go home. One step further: Imagine sending (even later in time) more advanced fleets that could study a place and contruct a human habitation with robots and materials before humans even left Earth to head where ever. Even further: now imagine sending such fleets to other star systems centuries before humans. The environment could assesed. Suitable structures built and pressurized with atmosphere. Everything could then be maintained by yet another group of robots for centuries or even millennia with every aspect of the greater system under the direction of planning software. Hell they could mine endless reserves of materials and chemicals that humans would want upon arrival. Alot of this would likely require advanced nanotech.
I am sure it can be taken to even greater extremes.
-I have a science fiction novella to write!
BTW - I have been visiting slashdot everyday since it opened in what, 96 or 97? As of this post I have only now bothered to create an account! So FIRST POST in a sense I guess.
it's not every day you see posts on slashdot that have giant detailed 3d models of two blocks from your house...
If you dont squint your left or right eye and really really look at it you can kinda see how it resembles... Dali's The Persistence Of Memory painting.
See content acquisition section here.
How easy would it be to take this modeling infomation and to import it into one of our favorite games, such as CounterStrike or CS:Source?
As I walk through the valley of death I fear no one, for I am the meanest sonova bitch in the valley!