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> And the office’s large headcount (now near 5,000) suggests some sort of manual / labor-intensive process. My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d ma
by Osmose 8y ago
> And the office’s large headcount (now near 5,000) suggests some sort of manual / labor-intensive process.
My partner briefly worked for a human-powered 3d mapping firm; they would get satellite and plane/drone photography of a large swath of land, split it up into block-sized chunks, and then each worker would take a block and use an in-house program to model the buildings at a pretty impressive level of detail. Workers got paid per-block and blocks were priced based on their complexity. They've been doing this for over 10 years by this point, so it's not an entirely unknown or uncommon thing to handle this kind of work manually.
- ksec 8y agoIs this even sustainable in a "World" Scale? Because at this rate I don't see this brings Apple to cover all the major cities of world in 10 years time, let alone majority of lands which aren't in these locations.
- londons_explore 8y agoEach building in the world probably took thousands of man-hours to construct. Mapping said building probably takes a matter of minutes. In a world sense, the economics of making the map are very cheap.
- Osmose 8y agoMore than minutes, but absolutely orders of magnitude less than it took to build them. In an ideal future, one can imagine submitting 3d models of buildings to a civic dataset as part and parcel of getting zoning approval.