My Photo

« Interactive Map Annotation From Ask | Main | The Mystery Of The Hybrid Car »

December 04, 2006

Comments

Ian Thomas

Trust the Scousers to find something to moan about, even in Google Earth.

Certainly Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth will always lag specialist apps that maps specific parts of the world (every time I view London in GE or Virtual Earth I find myself thinking, "why didn't they get the virtual map of London in The Getaway [PS2 game of a few years ago]?". What both apps need is an open way for hobbyists to submit visual data about landmarks. Not to understate the cooleness of the video clip you link to, but generating something that looks realistically like Snowdonia is comparatively easy, because there are no vertical (or overhanging) surfaces, and, frankly, if you get a rock or two wrong, no-one will notice. Rendering Big Ben correctly is more challenging.

Then you need to throw in the fact that urban landscapes are changing all the time - in fact, for certain aspects of urban terrain, it's difficult to say definitively what is permanent and what is transitory (for example, how do you render the big ad screens in Trafalgar Square in London or Times Square in New York?).

So there's still a ways to go. But I get a real Sci-Fi thrill about the prospect (not very many years from now) of a pretty realistic 3D model of the entire planet.

Ian
http://www.liesdamnedlies.com

The comments to this entry are closed.

Twitter Updates

    follow me on Twitter

    March 2016

    Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3 4 5
    6 7 8 9 10 11 12
    13 14 15 16 17 18 19
    20 21 22 23 24 25 26
    27 28 29 30 31    

    Categories

    Blog powered by Typepad