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There are plenty of other uses for this technology, however I believe it is cost prohibitive at the moment. Satellite imagery is not cheap, and you need multipl

There are plenty of other uses for this technology, however I believe it is cost prohibitive at the moment. Satellite imagery is not cheap, and you need multiple images for the entire area you are interested in. Then it takes massive computing power to extract geographically accurate 3d from 2d images. Google has 3d of some cities, but I believe they are hand modeled, and would take a very long time to do in new areas. It is possible they use LIDAR to do the 3d as well, but that would require flying low over an area to collect the data which can also be cost prohibitive, and dangerous. I have yet to see anything on Google Maps that looks anywhere near the quality of the sample video. Totally possible I have missed it though, do you have a link to somewhere?

3princip 11y ago
For example: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5032338,-0.1282209,513a,20y,41.61t/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5032338,-0.1282209,513a,20y,... Using Chrome and Earth view (and WebGL I think). This doesn't seem to have been done "by hand", looks to be algorithmic.
- Bedon292 11y ago
  Thanks. That definitely looks better than the previous 3d I have seen, though I am not sure it looks better than the Vricon stuff. They are definitely comparable at least. The textures are definitely algorithmic on Google Maps, but this page leads me to believe the models are not necessarily: https://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/citiesin3d/ https://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/citiesin3d/ They are asking for places to submit their models to be included. While I suppose this could be done arithmetically, it does not seem like Google is doing it themselves.
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