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More Info on Google's 3D Maps
Will Stewart writes "You have doubtless read that Silicon Valley Watcher reported on Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D, online version of San Francisco and eventually other major US cities, but you may not have seen the picture of where the trucks are kept and Berkeley's unrelated research project and published technical research (PDF file)."
To avoid loads of db queries and ads, the actual (rather uninteresting) picture is:
o ogleGarage.jpg
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/G
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/cityblock/
Some related info:
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More on Google 3D maps
3D Buildings
Lets start with the big things first. On selected US cities, you can view a grey scale 3D rendering of the city skyline. Pictures are worth more then words so I'll let the screenshots do the talking.
This was in Keyhole but it's still amazing. Screenshots really can't capture how amazing it is to freely move around a 3D world.
Amazon's "Blockview"
The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is "Block View," which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.
Yup - have a look at this. Although the image doesn't show the facades of the buildings.
Oh - on that note, take a look at the images here, especially this one... if google are using trucks, how are they going to get the texture maps for the top of the buildings as shown in that image??
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
As described in the page you linked (http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/~frueh/3d/), that is done by merging the street level data gathered from drive-thrus with aerial data gathered from fly-bys. You can see a picture on the same page where only street level data was used and what the result looks like.
reference: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2003/08/31/MN305247.DTL
All of your ideas are great ones and can be acomplished with Google Maps right now, plus a little work.
r owse_frm/thread/a6ff645e0cc619c7/78d99f027d95aa1b# 78d99f027d95aa1bthis thread at google groups about drawing custom trails.
1) Your elevation idea is very good. Elevation data can be found from the USGS website and others. Plot it on the map with different colored "pins" representing the different heights and you've got yourself a topo map.
2) Downloading GPS tracks has also already been done. I can't find the URL right now, but someone has done it. Check out http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Maps/b
3) Downloading the route to GPS also sounds like something that could be done quite easily, as the route data from a driving directions request is returned as pairs of latitude and longitude decimals (in XML, too). Parse the latitude and longitude data into waypoints for your GPS unit and voila, you have yourself handheld driving directions!
That is actually a picture of the Quonset hut shared by the Stanford Solar Car Project and the Stanford DARPA Grand Challenge team. As a member of the project, I was quite surprised to see our site on Slashdot. Apparently the Grand Challenge vehicle (the VW touareg seen in the right hand side of the photo) sidelines as the Google mapping truck, since it has lasers and a very accurate GPS unit. Stanford Solar Car Project's logo is prominently displayed on the first bay door, which is probably why they photoshopped it out as not to confuse people. Hope that clears things up.