

Pixel Perfect map of china - daleharvey
http://gz.o.cn/

======
quant18
There's quite a lot of map companies offering similar "SimCity-style" maps:

Edushi (<http://edushi.com/>), as others have mentioned --- IIRC they were one
of the first to market

Baidu rolled out their own offering in 2010 (go to <http://maps.baidu.com/>,
pick a city from the menu on the right, and then click the "三维" button)

City8 (<http://city8.com/>) don't have 3D maps, but they have a Streetview
equivalent which they've been working on since 2008 in Shanghai, Beijing, and
other cities: <http://en.city8.com/search/search.aspx>

Couple of articles which may be interesting reading (in Chinese) --- touching
on China-specific privacy, legal/data licensing issues, etc. surrounding these
maps:

[http://news.xinhuanet.com/internet/2008-03/14/content_778745...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/internet/2008-03/14/content_7787457.htm)

<http://finance.jrj.com.cn/2010/09/0315448095546.shtml>

~~~
d_r
This is neat. For example:

Shanghai skyscrapers: <http://j.map.baidu.com/-FNB> Beijing Olympic stadium:
<http://j.map.baidu.com/TjNB>

Edit: for some reason, the links don't work in Chrome. Firefox works though.

------
garply
A couple of notes from a resident of Beijing:

I wonder how frequently this will be updated. I notice several skyscrapers
built over the past few months that aren't displayed yet (they only show the
construction huts). So it's at least several months out of date.

This clearly has the most detail for zooming and browsing that I've seen, but
for my day-to-day use I'll still be using map.sogou.com, which already has
pretty good building and landmark decomposition, but has the best path-finder
/ location search of everyone in the market by far. I just made several
queries on bj.o.cn that fell flat. For really hard-to-find places, I suspect
I'll do my searching on sogou first, then pull up the closest landmark on o.cn
and scroll over to where I want to be for a good visual description of where
I'm going.

~~~
yoonminn
"I notice several skyscrapers built over the past few months that aren't
displayed yet"

that's a crazy pace !, compared to seeing the same unmistakable window view at
San Jose/ SF every single year.

------
kulpreet
I've mentioned this before, but entering the "Chinese" internet (or internet
of any foreign culture for that matter) is like entering a whole new world.
It's amazing how the cultural aspects impacts small things like design sense
and advertising colors.

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fictorial
This is mind-blowing. How was this created? The detail is incredible:
<http://i.imgur.com/gmsu4.png>

~~~
rywang
The buildings are meticulously 3-D modeled and texture mapped--you can see the
texture repetition artifacts. I've read some research about automatic modeling
techniques from street view images+, but I'd suspect this was done by hand.

\+
[http://web.mit.edu/jxiao/Public/publication/2009/TOG/paper_h...](http://web.mit.edu/jxiao/Public/publication/2009/TOG/paper_high-
res.pdf)

~~~
dasil003
Looks like China's cheap labor is bridging the gap to AI.

~~~
marshray
Perhaps they'll perform Searle's "Chinese room" experiment IRL.

~~~
patio11
Props for the reference, but aside from matching /Chin/ the Chinese room has
absolutely nothing to do with this approach. It is staffed by a single guy and
it is critically important to the thought experiment that _he does not
understand Chinese_.

(Brief sketch of the Chinese room: there is a locked room with a slit which
permits paper to come in and paper to go out. Inside the room is a man who
does not speak Chinese. He receives paper with Chinese symbols on it, consults
a vast library of books with rules on what to do in response to particular
symbols, laboriously copies his response onto paper, and pushes it out through
the slit. The response is intelligible as Chinese responsive to the input
Chinese. Searle argues that the man can't understand Chinese. Personal
opinion: it's navelgazing that only matters to philosophy, but I think the man
and books together constitute a system which speaks Chinese, in the same way
that people bidding in an auction together constitute an efficient price
discovery mechanism even if none has expert knowledge of the "true value" of
all items at auction.)

~~~
hasenj
The point is not whether the system understands Chinese, the point is that
such an "algorithm" or "system" does not produce human-like consciousness.

~~~
gjm11
> The point is not whether the system understands Chinese

From early in Searle's paper: "Partisans of strong AI claim that in this
question and answer sequence the machine is not only simulating a human
ability but also 1. that the machine can literally be said to understand the
story and provide the answers to questions, and 2. that what the machine and
its program do explains the human ability to understand the story and answer
questions about it. Both claims seem to me to be totally unsupported by
Schank's work, as I will attempt to show in what follows."

And, just after describing the "Chinese room" scenario: "Now the claims made
by strong AI are that the programmed computer understands the stories and that
the program in some sense explains human understanding. But we are now in a
position to examine these claims in light of our thought experiment."

> human-like consciousness

No, Searle is not at all only concerned with "consciousness". Searle again:

""" "But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of
being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a
program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of
understanding?" This I think is the right question to ask, though it is
usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to
it is no. """

(The focus on "consciousness" is a more recent development, and I cynically
suspect it's motivated by a recognition that as far as anything we can observe
goes, computers are in fact likely to be able to do everything humans can in
the not too distant future -- so best to concentrate on something conveniently
unfalsifiable, such as the claim that computers couldn't really be "conscious"
even if they behaved in every respect exactly as if they were.)

Searle talks about "understanding" throughout. He occasionally makes reference
to other mental capabilities, including "consciousness" once or twice, but
"understanding" is much the most frequent.

~~~
hasenj
"understand" is an overloaded term. It could mean a few things:

\- Human like understanding, i.e. awareness, consciousness

This is what the Chinese room experiment is designed to dispute

\- Ability to produce appropriate output

We often use "understand" to mean this. e.g. "I wrote a parser that
understands Ruby code and compiles it to C".

Of course the Chinese room "understands" Chinese in the second sense, but not
the first sense.

You first quote is describing what I consider to be awareness/consciousness.
Maybe Searle didn't use the same word, but I believe he's describing the same
notion.

Think of it this way: a C compiler doesn't really "understand" C code in the
same way that a human does. For instance, it can't make changes to the code.
If it could, it would replace the programmer.

Edit:

From wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room>

> The experiment is the centerpiece of Searle's Chinese Room Argument which
> holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding",
> regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave.

------
otterley
This map only covers Guangzhou, actually. But I look forward to full coverage
of China in a few hundred years!

~~~
Ahmes
You'll probably be waiting longer than that. One of the reasons China opted
for the hand drawn approach is it lets them control what is and (more
importantly) _isn't_ shown.

~~~
teaspoon
I enjoy a good sinophobic innuendo as much as the next guy, but how is it any
easier to omit something from a hand-drawn map than to blur it out in a
satellite photo?

[http://www.itsecurity.com/features/51-things-not-on-
google-m...](http://www.itsecurity.com/features/51-things-not-on-google-
maps-071508/)

~~~
roel_v
I have no opinion on what is true in this context, but completely in the
abstract: when drawing things it's possible to put in fake data (residential
area or forest where a military facility or nuclear reactor is located)
without it being possible to be detected. The blurring at least shows that
_something_ is there.

~~~
jcl
Heh... It's possible to fool aerial viewers as well:

<http://thinkorthwim.com/2007/08/19/1034/>

~~~
roel_v
That is wicked cool, thanks for the link. It must be awesome to be assigned a
job like this, or being part of the crew implementing it.

------
riams
I asked this on Quora a while back: [http://www.quora.com/How-does-Chachaba-
create-their-3D-virtu...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-Chachaba-create-
their-3D-virtual-city-maps)

------
alphakappa
It's hard to explore o.cn in detail because everything is in Chinese, but
whatever they have is quite impressive. Not only is the 3D view really well
rendered (i.e. easy on the eyes), they have incredible attention to detail,
down to using billboards as ad space.

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impendia
Reminds me so much of SimCity, only you can't raise taxes.

------
drv
How can an image be "pixel perfect" if the original is not made of pixels? I
can understand pixel-perfect image scaling or the like, but a pixel-perfect
map of the real world is impossible.

------
kondro
This is amazing. I wonder how they do this? Surely it has to be automated
somehow, I just can't imagine anyone building this by hand, even in China.

~~~
qntm
Obviously this is not what was done here, but how difficult is it to take a
satellite photo from the side, instead of from directly above?

~~~
icegreentea
Not very. Most photos are taken from some angle (it's easier to reorient a
satellite than to reposition its orbit). Course, you get the most quality when
shooting close to straight down.

------
brisance
Wow... just... wow. The obvious question is... how was this done? Mechanical
Turk?

------
jjcc
There's another company eDushi created this kind of map in 2007 or earlier.
The company is in Hangzhou. They cover more cities than o.cn. I've checked the
details of architecture. Quite accurate. And there is a lot daily life related
information hidden in the map.

Here's the map of Hangzhou. <http://hangzhou.edushi.com/>

~~~
mtw
this is also very impressive. I like how they add small buses and signs to
indicate bus stops. We can also see the name of big shopping centers

~~~
jjcc
I checked how they did that. Basically they provide a easy way to let a
user(Small buses owner) to add info. In other words it's a kind of "social
mapping".Probably with some control.

I found an English version of the company behind Edushi:
<http://www.aladdincn.com/en/index.html>

------
pointernil
The technical/theoretical side of it, the how do you scale up the (automatic)
creation of those Sim-Cities ... yes, VERY fascinating and interesting.

The other side of the medal: those maps are creating a cute, sleek, clean and
well-behaved view on the areas of high(est) population density ... they are I
think heavily distorting the perception of the reality in those areas. I
consider them a very strange way to do propaganda.

The reality is hidden by this means, which is the opposite of what maps/sat
maps should be providing...

"Pixel Perfect" nails it quite good. They are unrealistically perfect.
Constructed down to every pixel presented.

Event the most horrible sweatshops look cute in this renderings.

------
wybo
If this had/has an API it would make for a great game-board for MMOG's/on-
line-&-offline-games or even strategy-games. Imagine adding textures for units
and/or craters (though I'd guess this latter would be banned pretty soon).

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zbanks
I assume they're doing this because of some government restriction on
photographing the city? Otherwise, I can't imagine that this kind of effort
could be profitable...

------
jcromartie
Meaning "pixel-art-style map of part of one city in China with many
copy/pasted buildings."

~~~
kalleboo
You can change cities by clicking on "切换城市". Of course it's still not the
whole country but it's still more than one city.

------
jac_no_k
Baidu has something similar as well: <http://j.map.baidu.com/hg2l>

Are they doing this to get around some restrictions on showing real images?

~~~
epynonymous
there's no restriction, most of google earth works. personally i feel that
these sim city maps are easier to view compared to live ariel photos.

i went to edushi to discuss a business opportunity, they were telling me how
these were updated, i heard it's weekly. they also have a program with a
school that teaches 3d studio max so they have a pipeline of people to help
render these sim city like maps.

------
anactofgod
And... it was out of date the minute it went live...

Can't read the language. What is this? The SimCity version of China?

~~~
sunqiang
It's Chinese, which is a three-dimensional map of GuangZhou city, the labels
are the names of places. and as rywang mentioned above, there is a 3d map
<http://sh.o.cn/> for ShangHai too

~~~
anactofgod
Sorry. I did understand what was being shown, even though I couldn't read the
language. I was just making a joke about how the map looked like a SimCity
game.

Actually, I was making two jokes, the second being how the map was out of date
the instance it was published, because of how quickly a city's buildings and
streets can change in China.

Still, it is very nicely done!

~~~
sunqiang
Sorry for my broken English, thanks for the elaboration.

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moblivu
I wonder if the whole city is a vector....

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sebastianavina
Damn. Now I want to live in one of those cities... they're so cuteee!

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RK
Where are the 1.3 billion people?

