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Future of 3D Street View To Include Live Video
An anonymous reader writes "3D textured cityscapes are nothing new to Google Earth users: international cities such as New York have displayed this type of imagery for a while now. But now Google has made a critical change to Google Earth — adding high-resolution Street View imagery to existing city textures, effectively creating a semi photo-realistic 3D sim city you can fly through on your PC. As this article and videos show, it's only the tip of some very fancy features coming to online maps, with Microsoft demonstrating the ability to see Flickr images of your surroundings as you fly through cities (including the bizarre possibility of seeing horses and carriages on the streets), look up at the sky and see the stars through Worldwide Telescope, the ability to go inside buildings thanks to backpack cameras, and see live video streams from a friend's phone, turning the static map image into a live video."
the possibilities of VERY extensive maps for various games.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Honey, pull down the bathroom shade!
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
OK, now we need a Rocket Launchers and Railguns there.
Any info on when I get to summon Godzilla or UFO yet?
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
We all know where this is going; combined with brain-machine interfacing this technology will be used to trap millions of humans in a nightmare world where everyone is forced to walk down the middle of the road, nobody can go indoors, and the population is terrorised by giant flying pliers.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The Google Earth application has always been much, much, much more enjoyable to use than the Google Maps web site. Like usual, real applications are always years ahead of "web apps".
I wish they would add their streetview images to Google Earth, and have it so that we can travel around the city fluidly. Right now, with the Google Maps web site and streetview, you have to sometimes click ten, twenty or even sometimes thirty times just to travel the length of a short city block!
They should be able to take the separate images and combine them into textures that they can overlay on a real 3D model of a city. Then we can travel around the cities in realtime, rather than looking at a static photo, clicking the mouse to move ahead a few feet, looking around at a static photo, clicking the mouse to move ahead a few feet, and so on.
Web apps will never be as flexible as real desktop apps. I wish they'd put more focus there, even if it means sticking some ads here and there.
http://www.aos.wisc.edu/fireball/2010_04_14_fireball_loop_1024x768_long.gif
as well as avoiding stuff that (really) matters, 'watering DOWn', deletions, subversions, attacks etc.... nothing new really. tell 'em robbIE
Now all we need is to hook this in to the camera networks that already exist in a lot of cities.
Seriously, it solves the "who watches the watchers" problem and adds heaps of interest. Real time public video feeds.
I haven't read the article yet, but I hope that it's not really Live Video. It would be a haven for real stalkers (not the cyber kind).
The Bing mapping application can pull in images and videos, such as from Flickr, that have geolocation and timestamps, and overlay those with photo registration over top of the regular Bing street view images. That includes webcam sources that may be live.
Who else thinks that Google consists of alien gamers that are trying to complete a worldwide matrix simulation of earth (and every other planet they encounter). Why else would they datamine all the worlds knowledge *and* create a 3D model of the earth???
We know after all that aliens are addicted to games: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/04/15/051213/Maybe-the-Aliens-Are-Addicted-To-Computer-Games. This only proves it!
Now excuse me I have to go out to buy some more tinfoil...
Not that I'm a fan of Bing.... just sayin' they demo'd this a couple of months ago. I'll try to find a link.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
Sim city? Next thing you know we'll have Google Mars and the ability to make martian families.
that I also thought of the video game possibilities. Imagine that as time wears, our texture and detail maps are a user based subset. Anyone with a camera phone can upload directly to google earth, eventually creating a copy of our cities, towns and such. Now imagine a virtual reality pay to play mmorpg that utilizes downloadable content via the alternate world. A world like the matrix where users can upload and download in real time. This could be epic.
The technology is cool all in its own right. But take a look at the video. All cars look like they're all squashed by monster trucks. That makes it twice as cool!
It's been a while since I last looked at this, but a company in Sweden came up with an, arguably, better method to both Google and Bing for 3d maps.
the flash demo shows quite detailed storefronts, but with the speed of retail turnover, i'm sure many are gone by now...what's needed is some way of indicating when the images were taken...g.e. already has a timeline...
I work in GIS (Electronic maps) for a county government. I've seen some of the demos for this stuff, pretty interesting how they can process seperate data sources (photos & 3D shapes) into a 3D model programaticly, though I have been told it does mess up from time to time resulting in some hillarious views. But I think this tech is about to get blown away (or at least massively augmented) in the next few years. I've seen demos for what is best described as 3D rasters, Aerial images where the pixles have not only an X & Y axis but a Z axis. They are created by putting together Oblique photography (Bings "Birds Eye") and Oblique LiDAR (Topographic mapping, not only from the top but from the sides). Size is a bit of an issue but not as much as you would think, using the current compressing techniques a full county (~750 Sq/Mi) in 6" pixel resolution only takes up 13.5Gb (Thank You "Mr. SID"), adding a Z access to that info may up the size to 16-17Gb. Compair that to Pictometries Oblique imagery (Bings "Birds Eye) at about 350 Gb to 500 Gb estimated for our county. Currently they are primarialy focusing on aircraft & stationary (a Lidar/Camera on a portable tripod) capture, but I imageine the tech could easily be modified to be put onto a vehicle for street view. The issue at the moment is of course cost, but as for most tech, it is dropping. Five years ago standard aerials for our county cost about $100,000 Now you can get that & obliques for about $75,000.
So I can put glasses on and behold an annotated reality?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
One thing I like about the present market for online mapping solutions is that it is a good example of competition actually working as it should, with two big players (Google and Microsoft) bringing in new features of their own, as well as reimplementing those that the other side thought of first. Google came up with Street View - and, recently, Bing Maps added the same (and camera control and transition animations are, IMO, better). Microsoft came up with "bird's eye" view (aerial photos at an angle, where you can see the shape of buildings etc) - now Google added a similar thing to Maps. Now we see competition in the area of "augmented reality".
for the one and only feature I actually need in a map. ACCURACY.
Why is it that ALL software based maps I have found to date are 2-3 YEARS behind the paper maps sold at the gas stations?
At work I have a TomTom GPS with the latest North American map, including all corrections that are available to it, I have access to google maps, mapquest, yahoo, etc via an Internet connected laptop, and my blackberry has it's mapping application as well, and yet I still have to pull out a physical printed paper map book any time I'm in a subdivision that was created in the past 3 years (sometimes longer.)
Software maps should be EASIER to keep up to date, my current paper map is now a year and a half old, and is still more current than any online or software based map I can find (and I've tried just about all the online ones, as well as a half dozen or more handheld ones).