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I've been interested in the two approaches to mapping out cities and larger places. Google, for example, has StreetView cars, building a point cloud and textur

by ipsin 12y ago

I've been interested in the two approaches to mapping out cities and larger places. Google, for example, has StreetView cars, building a point cloud and texture map of parts of the world. In video games like GTA, LA Noire and Watch Dogs real cities are mapped out using a sort of "conceptual compression" that leaves landmarks but somehow brings the space closer together. My sense is that this is a labor intensive process, but what if it could be automated? It would be interesting way to explore a place, though with the obvious pitfall that what's not included in the map "doesn't exist".

drivingmenuts 12y ago
The process would still be somewhat labor-intensive, since someone would have to apply significance to the landmarks. GTA, specifically, doesn't use all the landmarks they find - they instead use rough facsimiles that give the same impression. It's really rather brilliant - a different design, but somehow it's familiar if you've been there or seen that. Ultimately, for video games, they are still designed by hand, because of the "if it's not there, it doesn't exist" problem and for a host of other reasons. Unfortunately, for space reasons, most of it is non-interactive in a meaningful way. There's some interesting work being done by ESRI that could hopefully lead to virtual city designs that are almost fully interactive. Imagine GTA where every building could be entered and every object could be interacted with because they are generated on the fly. Sort of a realistic Minecraft. Very sort of, but still.
- GrantS 12y ago
  I would argue the "significant landmark" problem has essentially been solved as a side effect of online photo sharing sites (originally Flickr, now everything) -- the most frequently photographed things are the landmarks, and the number of photos scales with the significance of the landmark. When you search for "Rome" on Flickr, the clusters of photos that pop out as being 3D-reconstructable are precisely the landmarks. See this popular work from 2009, "Building Rome in a Day": http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/ http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/ Quoting: "The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags "Rome" or "Roma". Matching and reconstruction took a total of 21 hours on a cluster with 496 compute cores. Upon matching, the images organized themselves into a number of groups corresponding to the major landmarks in the city of Rome. Amongst these clusters can be found the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon."

by ipsin 12y ago

drivingmenuts 12y ago

The process would still be somewhat labor-intensive, since someone would have to apply significance to the landmarks. GTA, specifically, doesn't use all the landmarks they find - they instead use rough facsimiles that give the same impression. It's really rather brilliant - a different design, but somehow it's familiar if you've been there or seen that. Ultimately, for video games, they are still designed by hand, because of the "if it's not there, it doesn't exist" problem and for a host of other reasons. Unfortunately, for space reasons, most of it is non-interactive in a meaningful way. There's some interesting work being done by ESRI that could hopefully lead to virtual city designs that are almost fully interactive. Imagine GTA where every building could be entered and every object could be interacted with because they are generated on the fly. Sort of a realistic Minecraft. Very sort of, but still.

GrantS 12y ago
I would argue the "significant landmark" problem has essentially been solved as a side effect of online photo sharing sites (originally Flickr, now everything) -- the most frequently photographed things are the landmarks, and the number of photos scales with the significance of the landmark. When you search for "Rome" on Flickr, the clusters of photos that pop out as being 3D-reconstructable are precisely the landmarks. See this popular work from 2009, "Building Rome in a Day": http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/ http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/ Quoting: "The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags "Rome" or "Roma". Matching and reconstruction took a total of 21 hours on a cluster with 496 compute cores. Upon matching, the images organized themselves into a number of groups corresponding to the major landmarks in the city of Rome. Amongst these clusters can be found the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon."