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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."

4 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. this creates ... by polar+red · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the possibilities of VERY extensive maps for various games.

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    Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
  2. Simcity? by syockit · · Score: 3, Funny

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

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    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.
  3. Better summary by michaelmalak · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.

  4. Re:How about adding streetview to Google Earth? by Allicorn · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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    OMG!!! Ponies!!!