

Google Maps, Earth take on full 3D imagery - alt_
http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/06/google-maps-earth-take-on-full-3d-maps/

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alt_
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...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/06/06/google-maps-launches-
metropolitan-3d-maps-in-google-earth-on-mobile/)

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

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cloudwalking
Yours has been updated with the same video.

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teraflop
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).

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

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

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freehunter
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.

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culturestate
GPS already works offline, doesn't it? It just places you on a grid with no
tiles.

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twelvechairs
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?

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bonafidehan
> \- 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.

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erjiang
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.

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culturestate
Plus, let's not forget that Apple bought C3, so I wouldn't be surprised to see
them roll this out at an even larger scale next week.

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tobyjsullivan
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...

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potatolicious
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.

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cromwellian
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.

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gatlin
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.

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huggyface
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).

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taligent
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.

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tonfa
Does iOS maps show ads from Google?

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abruzzi
Yup. I was searching for a hotel in Roswell, and a "sponsored link" located
the Motel6 with a different pin icon than the others.

Go center the map on Roswell, NM. Search for "motel" and you'll see the ad,
and it will come back as the default selected pin.

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205guy
Exactly. Search results for businesses or locations in Gmaps on iOS are broken
because of all the irrelevant junk they include, and I can only assume they do
it because they got paid.

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

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christiangenco
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?

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205guy
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?

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molmalo
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>

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

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cheatercheater
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.

