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."

Comments

this creates ...

[polar red]

the possibilities of VERY extensive maps for various games.

Re:this creates ...

[Bakkster]

Agreed, for as simple and pointless as that game was, I had so much fun free driving around that scaled-down Chicago in a user created A-Team van. I say, bring it on!

Plus, Google has all the map data to know where there are stop lights and where there aren't, the prevailing speed of traffic, and even the most likely places for a traffic jam. Imagine if your driving game had real-time traffic jams while you are street racing around the DC beltway at 5PM on a Friday.

Re:this creates ...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the detail too low?
Did you even read the SUMMARY?
Street view data combined with map data and 3D modelling data to generate high-res 3D imagery.
Yeah, you won't be seeing "grains of sandstone" high-res, but you will get something just above the Wii level of texturing.. maybe. In fact, probably higher still depending on the area.

You don't need good graphics to make a good game. (well, the COOL GRAFIX kiddies of today would disagree with that)
I'd happily play a GTA-like game in my own town, or FPS, RTS even more so. Zombie invasion in my own town? Oh hell yes.
Hell, i already tried to do the GTA thing a while ago back in the early days of Google Maps before street view existed.
I was going to write some scripts that would build up all the stuff for me and i would just walk around town taking pictures from the street.
But i never bothered due to the amount of work that would be required in modding GTA.

Re:this creates ...

[wealthychef]

the possibilities of VERY extensive maps

I think you mean "intensive" not "extensive." These more in-depth maps are only being made of large cities. I hope this is not a trend, where the big cities get every toilet bowl mapped in 3D, but smaller towns are still languishing with "mere" satellite overlays.

Re:this creates ...

[wed128]

I've driven around the DC beltway at 5pm on a friday. it's not something i'd want to simulate (or relive in any way)

Simcity?

[syockit]

Any info on when I get to summon Godzilla or UFO yet?

Google Matrix

[damburger]

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.

How about adding streetview to Google Earth?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How about adding streetview to Google Earth?

[Allicorn]

I'm going to take a gamble and say you didn't RTFA.

Surveillance cameras

[Bronster]

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.

Re:Surveillance cameras

[Sir_Lewk]

It doesn't solve the "who watches the watchmen" problem, it just adds more watchers. Now instead of just being wary of the government watching your every move, you have to be wary of that nosy neighbor across the street being even more nosy.

What would solve the watchers problem would be some sort of system that would allow civilians to watch the people who are watching the civilians. Good luck ever having that happen.

Better summary

[michaelmalak]

Since neither the Slashdot summary nor the original article's prose describe what is meant by "live video", here is a better summary so you don't have to sit through 8 minutes of YouTube:

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.

Bing already did it...

[eggoeater]

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.