Future of 3D Street View To Include Live Video 55
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."
this creates ... (Score:4, Interesting)
the possibilities of VERY extensive maps for various games.
Surveillance cameras (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The Future? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:this creates ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.