Google Maps, Earth take on full 3D imagery

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/06/google-maps-earth-take-on-full-3d-maps/

by alt_ • 14 years ago

89 43 14 years ago

engadget.com

alt_• 14 years ago

Sorry for the lack of content. I hoped they would have updated it properly.

antr submitted[0] a better link[1] with video. Seekable press event[2] is also up with more information.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074972

[1] http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/06/06/google-maps-launches...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMBJ2Hu0NLw#t=4105s

cloudwalking• 14 years ago

Yours has been updated with the same video.

washedup• 14 years ago

Looks awesome. I look forward to playing around with it in Google Earth.

FootballMuse• 14 years ago

3D is awesome, but the better feature is offline maps. Now I can make my older android a dedicated offline GPS unit.

huggyface4• 14 years ago

FWIW, that is currently a Google Labs feature on Android devices and has been available for some time. Perhaps they offer downloading of additional layers, but that wasn't demonstrated.

culturestate3• 14 years ago

Is navigation available offline, though? They didn't mention it.

freehunter• 14 years ago

From the CNet live blog I saw, they said GPS will work offline. That doesn't confirm that navigation will work, but at least there's that.

gatlin• 14 years ago

I'm guessing the "new process" is structure from motion and high-performance bundle adjustment (probably using Ceres, which they just opened). It's fascinating to think what they'll be able to reconstruct with their computing power and hi-res satellite imagery and millions of Picasa photos.

huggyface4• 14 years ago

Google Maps/Earth is a simply amazing product. I've seen a lot of hype building about what Apple is to unveil in the coming days, but I honestly cannot imagine what they can present that can challenge Google (though it won't be hard for them to challenge the terrible mapping in iOS currently which, while using basic Google tiles, is in an app built by Apple). You mentioned Picasa and that reminded me that a few weeks ago I was showing my children some sights (e.g. the Eiffel tower) from around the world, and all over the place were overlaid, perfectly mapped personal photos.

In the demonstration they discussed how they do this, which is essentially Google Planes getting AirView with special cameras (very similar to Google StreetView).

taligent• 14 years ago

Well based on what I've seen from Google so far it looks like what C3 (whom Apple acquired) has had for a while now. So to be honest it is Google catching up in the 3D space.

And clearly Google is rattled as all of this comes just days before Apple is set to announce their products. I guess losing a significant amount of traffic (all iOS users) will do that to you.

Either way it will be nice for Google to have some honest competition.

tobyjsullivan2• 14 years ago

This looks incredible but I'm a little put off by this only being available for mobile. Did I actually read that right? I would expect this to also come to the desktop browser but it doesn't sound like that's happening...

tobyjsullivan2• 14 years ago

Or is this simply the same functionality already available on desktop browsers being brought to mobile? I got the impression it was a new level of detail.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this feature can realistically be brought to desktop at this point.

We're talking about a whole lot of 3D rendering, many polygons, and a whole crapload of textures. Easy pickings for a smartphone native app, where just about every major phone on the market has obscene amounts of hardware acceleration under the hood.

Not so easy for desktops - whose graphical performance is often nearly non-existent. Not to mention you take another huge performance hit from WebGL... which also has poor penetration. So not only would most users be unable to use your newfangled 3D maps, many of the ones that can, will have an unusably slow experience.

This is one of those places where native apps really shine.

shock-value• 14 years ago

Hopefully they can at least get it on Google Earth soon.

iandanforth• 14 years ago

Parent should be captured for posterity:

2000 - "Run this on a phone? You're crazy" 2012 - "Run this on a desktop? Insane!"

cromwellian• 14 years ago

Most desktops, even those with crappy Intel GPUs have superior GPU performance to the best mobile devices. WebGL has poor penetration, but you really don't take much performance hit as long as you don't need to process data in JS, but then again, a modern i5 or i7 is much faster than an ARM on a mobile device, so what you loose in JS performance, you gain in CPU performance.

Current JS and WebGL performance is well within the range needed to make this work. MapsGL is already rendering a quite large workload, in fact, my intuition is that the 2D rendering, especially with rasterizing label text all over the place, is likely more expensive than navigating an octree and rendering a mesh.

JohnsonB• 14 years ago

Desktops have inferior 3d rendering capabilities compared to smart phones? Since when? Any desktop bought in the last 5 years will have an integrated or dedicated graphics chip that can at least match smartphone capabilities in this area. This can be demonstrated easily by using your desktop to browse Nokia's 3d map demo, which is equivalent to what Google is doing here. Whether WebGL is fast enough to do this on it's own is open to debate, but there isn't anything to indicate these 3d maps are particularly demanding for desktops.

twelvechairs2• 14 years ago

Looks great. A few points:

- They used new imagery from planes to do this, not the existing streetview imagery - I guess that means optical matching of the kind needed to do this (make a model from streetview imagery) is still a ways off.

- 3d maps has been done like this already (by bing and others), though this looks a better resolution.

- As someone who works with city spaces - can I use the 3d data? How can I download it or who do I have to pay?

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

>- As someone who works with city spaces - can I use the 3d data? How can I download it or who do I have to pay?

I don't work with city spaces and I would still kill to have access to the 3d data.

ZenPsycho• 14 years ago

if it's getting to your client via HTTP there will be a way to get at it, legit or not.

bonafidehan2• 14 years ago

> - 3d maps has been done like this already (by bing and others), though this looks a better resolution.

Bing appears to be using a non-scalable approach for Bird's Eye view. E.g., Seattle downtown contains a few 3d buildings in a very confined area. It might even be manually modeled.

What Google has announced is impressive because it is automated and scalable. Small demos are great and all (e.g. C3) but qualitatively different from getting something like this deployed into the real world.

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

erjiang• 14 years ago

C3 is a "small demo"? C3's 3D maps have been deployed and are publicly usable and cover at least 25 metropolitan areas. Google may be catching up fast, but there is nothing shown in the video that C3 haven't done already.

twelvechairs2• 14 years ago

Sorry. Clearly I remembered that wrong. I was thinking of yell.co.uk in the uk. Not sure why I wrote bing.

205guy2• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who expected the waves to be moving in that last scene in the video showing the Cliff House and Seal Rock in SF?

molmalo• 14 years ago

This. Since February 2009, when Google released Google Earth 5.0, adding the animated waves [1], I've being thinking that eventually, they could actually make a nicer animated coastline, like in so many games now. But comparing the satellite view, with the map view, maybe the resolution is not currently good enough to make the simulated water overlap perfectly the pictures and make the coast look nice.

[1] http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2009/02/post_3.html

teraflop• 14 years ago

For a demo of what this will look like, try Nokia's WebGL-based mapping demo: http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html

They only have 3D imagery in a few cities so far (click on the city markers).

noonespecial• 14 years ago

It seems far fetched now, but I actually expect streetview UAVs sooner than most people likely think.

christiangenco• 14 years ago

This seems incredibly plausible, especially since the pieces are already there (you could probably hack one together in a weekend for $1,000).

The biggest hurdle I foresee is in legislation - how is Joe the Plumber going to feel about a private company flying UAVs over his backyard taking pictures?

cheatercheater• 14 years ago

What I seriously want? GTA: Google Maps. Even if you can't walk into the buildings or anything. Even if it's top-down only.

I want it. Want want want want.

Google Maps, Earth take on full 3D imagery

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