Google Earth Beaten By Autorendering From Photos

Flu writes "Sweden's major engineer newspaper NyTeknik writes about a new technology which is used to automatically convert 60.000 aerial photographs of Stockholm, Sweden, into a 3d-world, similar to Google Earth's rendering of major buildings in some US cities. But unlike Google's laser-measured rendering, this technique took less than 8 days (including the photography) to automatically generate the 3D-model of Stockholm — which includes every building and details as high as individual trees! The program was developed by C3, a subsidiary of the Swedish defense industry company SAAB, together with a PC gaming company called Agency 9. The complete article is available (sorry, Swedish only), but the 3D-rendering of Stockholm is available as a Java applet from the Swedish phone-dictionary service Hitta.se (tick the checkbox — it's an ordinary disclaimer, and click 'Till 3D-kartan')." The technique used gives a cool water-color look to the scenes, too.

Comments

Re:Game mods

[Quarters]

Probably never. Even if the resolution was adequate (which it isn't) and you could somehow extrapolate street level views from aerial photography (you can't) there are still the issues of photo retouching and missing information for stacked spaces. Unless the plane could somehow magically photography the entire city at predetermined times of day and days of the year so that all of the images were lit identically and cast shadows in the same direction/length there would be an astronomical amount of work needed to retouch the source data for continuity. On top of lighting and shadows you'd have to remove all representations of people and cars, etc.. from the source data. Assuming you could get all of that done there's still the problem of missing data from stacked surfaces; tunnels, elevated trains, subways, overpasses, building interiors, etc... None of those spaces can be represented via extrapolated aerial photographs.

With the amount of dataset rework / additional work that would be necessary to create an artistically pleasing & competitive game with such data it will be a long long time before you see it even coming close to being more cost effective than hand creating a world to fit a game's specific needs.