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Google Earth Beaten By Autorendering From Photos

Posted by timothy on from the klicka-har dept.

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.

4 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Game mods by Enderandrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Game mods by maxume · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I would think that they could extend the technique to process 4 or 5 sets of data in order to eliminate things like shadows and fast moving objects (so cars, people, construction, etc). Probably not cost effective, but I don't think you would need to worry about capturing identical shadows, I think you could make sure that you captured different shadows and then process them out.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  2. Microsoft was so close... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This kind of model is what you get when you take the point cloud from Photosynth, mesh it and use the photos as textures.

  3. slashdotting by jonastullus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.