Originally published at: Google Maps is turning the world into one huge SimCity model | Boing Boing
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That does look cool but the one way I’m not going to use it is on a phone.
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Perhaps they’ll apply a tilt-shift filter so everything will seem to be miniaturized. That would be fun.
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Real or simulated, the issues were the same…
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Hmmm… Google Earth for VR already has this feature as a result of extensive photogrammetry of its datasets - the problem is the model and image resolution, which falls apart when you zoom too close to a feature. This video makes it look like that problem is licked. I hope that’s right, because G.E. has been my favorite VR application for several years now. I’d love to be able to get down to street level with full 3D and parallax.
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I believe the flyover feature similar to what you can do with Apple Maps has been part of Google Earth for a number of years.
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I assume the addition of fleeing birds is to alert you to a city’s possible predator location?
The realism is neat, but why do I need clouds and birds flying around in a map?
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An odd choice for a travel companion, but to each their own.
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Nice when there’s a ‘flight path’ going. but the actual user herky jerky mouse movements and clicks take away the fluidity of the effect.
This needs to be higher
I wonder if Google will license it out to allow games to be built on this, as it’ll be a pretty high bar for game developers to reach on their own, and this absolutely raises the bar of expectations. (And it would be pretty neat to have this level of quality for city-scapes in some games, even for a limited number of cities.)
I recently was thinking “Hey, Apple Maps is kind of good, now!” and then I tried to use it to find an address and it sent me to completely the wrong place. (It wasn’t even really an understandable mistake - it just had obviously bad data.) Eventually Google Maps told me where it was. So now I’m back to not trusting Apple.
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Those are actually artefacts from the original simulation; “Immersive View” is basically a rendered down version of that with lower resolution.
But I may have said too much already.
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How would it rise higher? This isn’t Reddit, posts are in a fixed order.
You’re welcome to submit it to the “needs more likes” thread, though.
Also: welcome
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This is really cool, but for some reason I will miss the view where all the houses are a little bit rounded off and trees are big triangular pyramids.
Also Google in the near future: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give us a floor-plan of your dwelling so we can call it our own IP and post it all over the fucking internet for everyone to see! Please!
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i was going to point out ms flight simulator uses bing to build its world… then i found out some people already replaced that data with google’s
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Interesting that this works, as I was under the impression that Google seems to put limits on use of their data in third-party apps…
That would be Google Home View.
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