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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.
How long until someone uses technology like this to do a GTA-like in actual New York City, with real buildings as opposed to Liberty City? Admittedly, that would start getting creepy when you realize those are real residences and the like.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This kind of model is what you get when you take the point cloud from Photosynth, mesh it and use the photos as textures.
I can't remember where now, but I remember some military contractor type company working to clear up image meshing like this on a robotic vehicle program somewhere (at least I think I do, but now can find no links for it). If they clean up the details with revised software, this would be an awesome terr^H^H^H^H^Hflight training sim setup.
The story I read was about creating 3D maps from sat pictures, inserting geodata where it was known, and using this as guidance data for unmanned passenger vehicles like the latest DARPA challenge.
Theoretically, if you can update photos every other day, you could use this to map alternate routes for drivers, and correct inconsistencies in map data for Google maps and Yahoo maps et al.
It's all about the speed of updates. I'd think a single helicopter flying with a rather fancy camera setup (something like they use for capturing a murder scene etc.) could cover a metropolitan area in a day, crunch the photo data, update... presto, accurate maps. Even 8 days is pretty damn fast.
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It seems as if the geometries are calculated from scratch in real time.
;)
This article is gonna have quite an effect on their servers
At first I though: *yuch* this is awful with the geometries being at very low resolution and with strong artifacts. But as the script kept processing it's looking really good by now, except that it's still hour-glassing and I can't zoom in after minutes.
How long do you think it'll be before there are street level views of, say, Devil's Canyon, the middle of the Namib desert, or halfway up K2? The beauty of this is that it lets you get a map of virtually anywhere from the air. No, it's not perfect. It looks kind of like a cross between a Salvador Dali painting and Magic Carpet; around every corner I expect to see either a melting clock or a balloon picking up mana spheres ;). But the fact is that it was able to be assembled with minimal computational effort from a resource (aerial photos) that is already widely available for many areas -- and, for areas where it's not, can be rapidly gathered. Sounds like a winner to me.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Not to mention the Gripen. Damn fine fighter plane. It's maybe a generation or half behind the bleeding edge, but it's cheap.
> It seems as if the geometries are calculated from scratch in real time.
That wasy my initial thought, but (having watched it load, but not read the (F) article) now I'm thinking perhaps it's just an incremental load of a height field.
The height-field v. polygon guess is also supported by seeing how bridges are handled - for example, with flat sides that include images of boats striped up them.
This is certainly Java related... it's a Java applet that is handling the rendering/visualization. :-D
It's FAST!!!!
Thank's for posting this! I didn't know Stockholm was so beautiful!
Cheap? It is 4 times more expensive than the F16, which is only a half generation behind Grippen, and twice as expense as the F16 2nd edition which is similar in technology to Grippen but bigger, faster and more powerfull.
Sorry, butSweden is cheating themselves by insisting on using inferior local technology.