For years I've been dreaming of a driving/pedestrian sandbox game that used Google Maps data to let me drive recklessly around my home town with accurate models of the buildings and roads.
Me too. The problem seems to be mainly that the models are still awfully approximate and the textures are horribly blurry. They're fantastic for a bird's-eye view or flight simulators, but not what you want for driving.
I'm hoping that at some point in the next 10 years, Google/Microsoft come up with a high-res version produced mainly by Street View-type data or similar drone-supplied data. I suspect that basic photogrammetry is the easy part -- that the challenging part is dealing with changing sun position, hourly/daily/monthly weather/seasons, and all of the pedestrians and moving/parked vehicles.
Fun fact: Google street view cars record video-- the widely spaced street view nodes are a small fraction of the imagery they have stored. It should be pretty easy to do higher res photogrammetry with the raw data.
That's what I was thinking. The satellite photos are detailed enough to see lane lines, and combine that with the street level photos will get you the road configuration.
But I think whatever data GPS software uses is already detailed enough to know lane config, it tells you exactly what lane to be in when making turns.
This is amazing - it will be cool when these models in unity can be turned into real buildings where one can design the interiors as well, and maybe use this in Hitman to play real cities.
Might it be the extreme chromatic aberration? I once read an article saying how to achieve 'photorealism' in computer graphics, one should add chromatic aberration, as that's what camera lenses naturally produce. I think some people take it too far though!
No lenses except the cheapest Chinese ones made for CCTV cameras exhibit noticeable chromatic aberrations. It's really annoying it's being pushed in video games so much lately.
Yeah but it looks pretty weird and blobby down there, and a lot of the street data is pretty warped and strange looking. I'm playing around with this for a cycling app, I think I'm going to go with sort of a drone follow camera.
To this day this is the best experience I had in VR by far. I spent hours roaming the earth, it's truly amazing. It's sad that Google is massively underutilizing this asset.
As the parent comments mentioned, Google Earth VR already exists and it's awesome (disclaimer: I had a hand in creating it). It's as close as you can get to "walking down the streets" with current data. All the available 3D and Street View data is there.
First off, THANK YOU to you and the rest of the Earth VR team. You’ve brought literal joy to many people through your work.
I brought my Quest Pro and a gaming laptop with me to visit a nursing home a few months back and took some of the residents on guided Earth VR tours of their hometowns/places that they remember fondly. I’ll never forget all the tearful smiles I witnessed that day, and it’s all thanks to you and your team.
Quick question: are these new 3D Tiles the same as what’s in Earth VR, or are they higher resolution/newer imagery? The video demo linked upthread looks incredibly crisp, but I’m wondering if that’s just an artifact of seeing it in 2D (the upclose castle textures on flyby looked a lot more like what I’m used to from Earth VR).
Always great to hear that people enjoy it :) I believe that this API uses the same up-to-date tiles as Google Earth VR and the 3D view in Google Maps. I saw some complaints on Twitter saying that maybe the last and highest level of detail is not available in the API but I haven't verified that myself. I don't currently work at Google and have no insider information.
What's wrong with companies teaming up for specific individual products? In this case, Flight Simulator. You license the technology with friendly fees and collab for the life of a single product. Just like all licenses.
(Also, no, MS/Asobo are not doing fine, their photogrammetry is renowned for looking like a molten hellscape, and the bing maps look pretty terrible compared to even plain gmaps, but it's MS so "it has to use Bing" =D)
I thought it was Blackshark.AI doing that specific part of Flight Simulator. AFAIK they are, or at least were looking for to, also selling that capability to other companies; and they are certainly not “vendor locked” with MS’s data..
What about it? Google charges MS/ASobo a "friendly" license fee, and MS/Asobo get a feature they can use to attract more players. All parties stand to gain concrete dollar amounts, the very backbone of capitalism.
Lovely simple Unreal project. It's amazing how much can be accomplished with Blueprints when all the necessary functionality is at your disposal (although it can be hellish when it's not). I have such a love/hate relationship with UE. Sometimes it will blow me away with how some stuff just works with a few blueprints and other times (especially around physics) it just wants to do stuff its way or the highway.
UE looks cool, it's full of features, but it's also full of warts (especially when you realize how poorly designed and implemented certain parts are, and the huge mess they made with their C++). My major issue with blueprints is that they are always abused and turn into an unmaintainable mess in the blink of an eye.
The company I work at has a massive UE-base codebase and we've been working hard for months to purge as much blueprint logic from our it as we can because it's simply impossible to maintain them. Epic is pushing them hard but I just can't see them as more than a way for amateurs to mock up stuff.
Yeah, after my initial honeymoon I'm souring on blueprints fast. Working with them on a team using version control must be a bit of a nightmare. Not having a way to export them into a human usable formal (say a good quality Lua style DSL) means excluding all kinds of tooling that could be built by other parties for handling text based code.
What UE sorely lacks is a good scripting language. It's clear to me that Tim Sweeney wanted to offer a C#-like experience, but using C++ - IMHO UE failed in any possible way to accomplish that - Epic made a sawed-off shotgun in place of a precision weapon. There are just a gazillion ways to introduce concurrency and memory issues in UE, but most of the time it's "fine" because for a videogame some aspects (like proper memory management, safety, ...) are less important than CPU cycles. A game often behaves as if it's the only application running on a machine, and if it gobbles too much RAM the usual answer the developer gives its users is, "buy more". Thankfully this has been changing in the last few years due to mobile gaming and freemium, which forces companies to target not top-notch machines but cheap laptops.
Do you have some more details you could share, like screenshots or trailers/videos? Sadly the video link to the trailer on YouTube is not working anymore.
This is one of our demos from 2008, which looks very similar (though we aren't using Google Maps data, we're mostly using OS map data). It's also long before an art pass, so the textures, trees, building, road etc are just placeholder.
This is Mike (who did the first lemmings)'s test to se how many lemming-like things you could render in the world. He, myself, and Bill (GTA physics) went on to build a fun game out of this where you could run over them in tanks and blow them up.
Yeah. Sebastian Lague's game videos are great because of the way he walks through his steps & methodology, but wrt his geographic implementations it's not how you would approach this problem for this level of granularity.
Thanks for the info. This is per API key? How many renderer requests does a user use per minute? I'm just trying to figure out if this is something that can be used in an app at scale.
"message": "Quota exceeded for quota metric '3D Tiles root requests' and limit '3D Tiles root requests per day' of service 'tile.googleapis.com' for consumer 'project_number:174664172126'.",
I remember working in this field about 15-20 years ago. And separately, in my spare time, playing video games like Crysis. It was quite apparent even then, that video games were generally light years ahead at visualisation.
Back then, one could - using professional, multi-thousand-dollar software, and expensive services like land surveyors - painstakingly, manually build up a small-scale 3D scene encompassing an individual owners land. The result would look average/generic, and the rendering performance and navigation limitations would be abysmal.
On that same PC, one could then load up Crysis, marvel at the vastly superior output, navigability, and point-of-view realism - covering massive land areas - and think 'Holy Shiz, if I could just get my data into this, it'd be a revelation, industry-changing'.
This shows how insanely optimized game engines are, and game development in general.
All enterprise software is optimised in man/hours, as in the maximum amount of features for some given hours of work. Enterprise customers will then invest in the extra hardware, because "developers are more expensive than computers".
Games can't afford that, they need to run in many different kinds of shitty and good hardware, so it is optimised over and over, by very dedicated and underpaid developers. And they mostly code in C++. But games are sold by the millions, so it's a different market.
It could be a great introduction to the metaverse. Imagine adding the interior spaces by making the doors and windows openable. Then allow for more and more interactions. A lot could be done by algorithms (image recognition, etc.), but I think a lot of users would be interested in "building this new world". Adding procedurally generated spaces through portals would be a great next step. We are not far away from being able to "create a castle described by X in Y mixing painting style of Z and sculpture style of Ź". Maybe transforming between these styles and others in time.
I remember toying with Google Earth a year or so back, thinking it'd be amazing if the actual Google Maps API would give access to that level of granularity. Was sort of baffled as to why they wouldn't. Definitely gonna give this a shot.
P.S. For those who haven't visited Google Earth (instead of Google Maps) in a long time, it's alive and well, and still pretty fun to go on a mini excursion with: https://earth.google.com/web/
You can do this stuff with drones and open source tools. I used a cheap 100 dollar intel drone to take photos of my house and processed the pictures using (alice vision?) software that built the 3D mesh. My idea was to package something together for a home remodeling system that would let people measure and look at their houses with a 3D model but it just so happens that I live in the no-drone radius within Washington DC. Cesium also has a pretty nice 3D tiling photogrammetry service.
How long would it take the drone to reach Utrecht?!
I think the beauty of this is the fact that it's now easy to do this for anywhere that has coverage from Google tiles.
I'd love to see a side by side of achieving this with Unreal Vs open source tools though, would give a good indication of the gap between them (if any).
On a side note.. regulation came in quite quick for the no-drone areas in a lot of places, scuppered our farmer unmanned livestock checking startup idea!
There's no way the drone would reach without breaking the law (or with you walking behind your drone the entire time).
Drone pictures are nice but most people aren't allowed to fly them in many places and even if they are, many densely packed cities have restrictions of their own.
This is a really fun way to combine something that is being discussed to death with something that is visually beautiful. I'm fairly disinterested in most ChatGPT usages at the moment, but this is a really good way to show its utility. Particularly because it doesn't place _too_ much emphasis on the factual accuracy of the responses ;)
I cannot stand the music, or music in any video of this type. I don't need or want its loaded suggestions. I would love to be able to hear even simulated wind whistling, and sounds from the scenes below.
30-ish years ago, DVD players supported alternate soundtracks so people could offer a soundtrack with music and without. I don't think I've ever seen that basic affordance on a web video. That would probably lead to more diegetic sound, and the tools to simulate it.
It would be really cool if there was more shared than a blog post with a video. What about either a tutorial, source code, or a link or download to use this ourselves?
Unfortunately you're not allowed to ship these files with your game. They have to stream directly from Google's servers for each user (caching is allowed as long as you follow standard caching rules).
But that has been around for an age as well - it just wasn't available via an API.
Bing came out with 3D buildings after Google did and the coverage was a small fraction of that Google had and hasn't increased very much in the intervening years.
(I hope apps will offer both as data sources and maybe select the one with the best fidelity for a given region)
Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to nilsbakker.nl. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.
curl failed to verify the legitimacy of the server and therefore could not
establish a secure connection to it. To learn more about this situation and
how to fix it, please visit the web page mentioned above.
(hf-course-3.9.13)
My guess is that it's the proxy responding since the server is going down. I got the same error and when I continued I saw "Your domain name is parked.
Hey owner of nilsbakker.nl
Your domain name is not linked to your web hosting package, reseller package or virtual/dedicated server.
If you need support in connecting your products, you can contact your provider."
These are the fields on the certificate that's being presented to me:
emailAddress = root@dns-redirect001.axc.nl,
CN = dns-redirect001.axc.nl,
OU = SomeOrganizationalUnit,
O = SomeOrganization,
L = SomeCity,
ST = SomeState,
C = --
A self-signed certificate that expired on 6/11/19, 4:35:46 PM GMT+2
It works for me (again) but I remember that server domain from my old Versio shared hosting account.
They used to be the typical "dirt cheap, low spec, PHP 5.4" hoster of choice for students and people looking to save a buck, but they've since raised their prices significantly (and I don't think they've raised their quality of service much).
Would not recommend. I wouldn't recommend shared hosting in the first place, but if you do, it's worth looking around for better hosts. There's a good chance you'll be better off with Github pages for hosting websites that you expect any visitors to see.
Probably just depends what order your TLS implementation is deciding to complain about the issues: it's not only self-signed but has no DNS SAN and the CN also mismatches.