Future of 3D Street View To Include Live Video 55
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samzenpus
from the live-eye-in-the-sky dept.
from the live-eye-in-the-sky dept.
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."
Re:this creates ... (Score:1, Insightful)
For flightsims yes, maybe for a RTS. The amount of detail is way to low for anything else.
How about adding streetview to Google Earth? (Score:2, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to take a gamble and say you didn't RTFA.
Re:this creates ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ... (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Surveillance cameras (Score:3, Insightful)
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.