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Pixel Perfect map of china
- impendia 16y agoReminds me so much of SimCity, only you can't raise taxes.
- alphakappa 16y agoIt'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.
- otterley 16y agoThis map only covers Guangzhou, actually. But I look forward to full coverage of China in a few hundred years!
- wpdev 16y agonah, there is a city switcher in the top left.
- rywang 16y agoAnd here's the one from Shanghai: http://sh.o.cn/ http://sh.o.cn/
- Ahmes 16y agoYou'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 16y agoI 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-maps-071508/ http://www.itsecurity.com/features/51-things-not-on-google-m...
- roel_v 16y agoI 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.
- foljs 16y agoAnd the Chinese government does not want the rest of China to be shown, because? You understand that those areas (and most of China) is already covered by Google Maps satellite view, right? Right?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- anactofgod 16y agoAnd... it was out of date the minute it went live... Can't read the language. What is this? The SimCity version of China?
- sunqiang 16y agoIt'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/ http://sh.o.cn/ for ShangHai too
- anactofgod 16y agoSorry. 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 Actually, I was making two jokes, the second being how the map was out of date the instance it was published, because of how quickly a city's buildings and streets can change in China.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 16y agoSorry for my broken English, thanks for the elaboration.
- brisance 16y agoWow... just... wow. The obvious question is... how was this done? Mechanical Turk?
- foljs 16y agoNo, silly: Mechanical Chinaman!
- fictorial 16y agoThis is mind-blowing. How was this created? The detail is incredible: http://i.imgur.com/gmsu4.png http://i.imgur.com/gmsu4.png
- rywang 16y agoThe 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_high-res.pdf http://web.mit.edu/jxiao/Public/publication/2009/TOG/paper_h...
- dasil003 16y agoLooks like China's cheap labor is bridging the gap to AI.
- marshray 16y agoPerhaps they'll perform Searle's "Chinese room" experiment IRL.
- patio11 16y agoProps 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.)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- kondro 16y agoThis 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.
- dstein 16y agoNot only can they build rendered cities at breakneck pace, they can do it for the real thing: http://www.businessinsider.com/shanghai-1990-vs-2010-2010-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/shanghai-1990-vs-2010-2010-6
- itsnotvalid 16y agoActually that's in fact possible. The models must be done by hand for landmarks, the rest may be repetitively. Similar efforts has been done by OSS games (http://wiki.openttd.org/City_Buildings_%28New_Graphics%29 http://wiki.openttd.org/City_Buildings_%28New_Graphics%29)
- DanI-S 16y agoI've seen similar maps from 100+ years ago of my hometown in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birmingham_in_1886.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birmingham_in_1886.jpg And of London: http://www.garwood-voigt.com/catalogues/H242051LondonBrewer.jpg http://www.garwood-voigt.com/catalogues/H242051LondonBrewer.... It's amazing how our idea of what is unachievable by hand has been skewed by computer graphics!
- qntm 16y agoObviously 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 16y agoNot 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.
- sebastianavina 16y agoDamn. Now I want to live in one of those cities... they're so cuteee!
- jjcc 16y agoThere'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/ http://hangzhou.edushi.com/
- mtw 16y agothis 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 16y agoI 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 http://www.aladdincn.com/en/index.html
- kulpreet 16y agoI'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.
- garply 16y agoA 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 16y ago"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.
- lunaru 16y agoo.cn doesn't seem to have very good coverage of Beijing. It looks like everything outside of the 3rd ring is missing.
- quant18 16y agoThere's quite a lot of map companies offering similar "SimCity-style" maps: Edushi (http://edushi.com/ 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/ http://maps.baidu.com/, pick a city from the menu on the right, and then click the "三维" button) City8 (http://city8.com/ 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 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_7787457.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/internet/2008-03/14/content_778745... http://finance.jrj.com.cn/2010/09/0315448095546.shtml http://finance.jrj.com.cn/2010/09/0315448095546.shtml
- storborg 16y agoThe Baidu maps are powered by o.cn--you can see "o.cn" in the watermark.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- d_r 16y agoThis is neat. For example: Shanghai skyscrapers: http://j.map.baidu.com/-FNB http://j.map.baidu.com/-FNB Beijing Olympic stadium: http://j.map.baidu.com/TjNB http://j.map.baidu.com/TjNB Edit: for some reason, the links don't work in Chrome. Firefox works though.
- thijsterlouw 16y agoOr for example chachaba.com (in Shenzhen): http://sz.chachaba.com/location.action?placeId=221a75f1-bcfc-44a1-94f5-022529f90691 http://sz.chachaba.com/location.action?placeId=221a75f1-bcfc... They had problems with providing a mapping service in China without a license though. They were forced to shutdown for a very long time + redesigned their website to survive. Make sure you get the right license first in China!
- 16y ago
- jac_no_k 16y agoBaidu has something similar as well: http://j.map.baidu.com/hg2l http://j.map.baidu.com/hg2l Are they doing this to get around some restrictions on showing real images?
- epynonymous 16y agothere'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.
- tuhin 16y agoBaidu is using the o.cn images itself as explained by the watermarks.
- RK 16y agoWhere are the 1.3 billion people?
- zbanks 16y agoI 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...
- wybo 16y agoIf 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).
- moblivu 16y agoI wonder if the whole city is a vector....
- riams 16y agoI asked this on Quora a while back: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Chachaba-create-their-3D-virtual-city-maps http://www.quora.com/How-does-Chachaba-create-their-3D-virtu...
- jcromartie 16y agoMeaning "pixel-art-style map of part of one city in China with many copy/pasted buildings."
- kalleboo 16y agoYou 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.
- drv 16y agoHow 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.
- pointernil 16y agoThe 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.