If it is another “because we can” now let’s build a business out of it, kind of thing – then with heavy sigh, I say “Oh sheesh, here we go again”

I mean think about it….
Let’s say that we spend $100 million making 2d/3d maps of everything.

The people who ACTUALLY need that information could just hop on a plane, go there, see for themselves, for $3 grand. All the rest is just fluff and hype.

AND, don’t totally take this wrong because I’m a gadget/technology freak as good as the next guy, but each day I become more realistic.

Only 30 days to map Frisco? Really? I assume you can only map during daylight hours, when the weather is nice, so these guys must be scurrying around like ferrets on meth. Love the work ethic!

One thing though, as opposed to just covering urban areas, Earthmine should definitely include the boondocks as well, because whereas a lot of people know the geography of the nearest big city, nobody except the residents has a clue about peripheral suburbs and little towns. So hick places would be MORE important than the major urban areas.

Apart from the extent of their coverage, the crunch factor would be price, I guess. I wonder if we’ll ever manage to con a VC into forking out enough cash to afford a service like this. Or maybe we can con Earthmine into taking equity?

I don’t want to drag this out, but I guess the answer lies in whether there is utility in using Google Earth vs. Google Maps. Maps provides greater reach because it’s browser-based and faster to answer casual queries now and then. But GE is much better at teaching spatial relationships. Maps is almost entirely 2D, even with Street View. Google Earth, with buildings & terrain, is almost entirely 3D.

I’m not arguing that you must prefer or use one or the other. I use both myself. I’m simply arguing not to call any analog of Google Maps (and especially Street View) “3D” so that we honor one big distinction among the many valid approaches to mapping the world.

Mark, I thought one nitpick was plenty, but I also agree that “indexation” isn’t a word, at least outside of economics.

I can definitely imagine governments paying for this type of a service.

Good luck selling it though.

The difference is HUGE and its extremely frustrating when people make this mistake. We don’t yet have realtime 3d in the browser(flash can only do so much.)

The fact that EarthMine may also be capturing/delivering depth information per pixel means very little if that information doesn’t actually add depth back into the image you see. It does not make the “environment” 3D just to say _they_ know the distance to each pixel. So what? The point of being able to walk “off-node” as it were is that it’s inconvenient to be limited to only the places (and times) where they took snapshots. It’s not a bad start, and I like all of these services so far. But it’s still very limited in what you can do.

Now, if they can truly extract phototextured 3D models from their scans, as you say, then that’s great. Rendering _those_ extracted (textured, polygonal) 3D models in a real-time app would qualify as really being 3D. Even doing plenoptic warping between nodes would be close enough. In fact, even delivering stereo pairs to a stereo output device would be close enough to call it 3D in a generic sense, because our brains can do the depth calculation in that case (though I’d still want free movement). But to call what is essentially the same rendering technology as QuickTimeVR “true 3D” is misleading at best.

And in fact virtualizing the scene is exactly what it will take to get past the inherent privacy problems with all of these systems. Ultimately, most people want a sense of the what the place is like, not just at the specific time the van happened to drive by, but in general. And that will mean essentially erasing people, cars, and other transient objects from the scene, and adding those back in dynamically, if there’s any need.

It sure will make it quicker for me to measure the buildings that I will be leaving explosives in. This will make life for us terrorists so much easier.

No more sneaking around in those damned hooded sweatshirts trying to take pictures and measurements. Gawd, did I hate that! Especially on a hot day.