The 3d Tokyo website linked here the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188767) also shows you buildings when you zoom in, I'm guessing the guy didn't gather this data himself for such a hobby project, but got it from some governmental survey source.
The article and the rest of the comments here act like Apple didn't do this 5 years ago. This is how Apple creates their 3D flyover feature. Microsoft also tried their hand at this as well.
This is done at a satellite level nowadays rather than fixed-wing aircraft. Microsoft/Bing did this as well and ended up spinning off their aerial collection division for that same reason, not too long after this article was published.
There's just not a huge demand for higher quality imagery by the general public, and those industries who do need higher quality/georeferenced imagery are willing to pay for it.
The screensavers for Apple TV and very manual and really cool how they are made. Everything was planned. The location, exact time/day, sun placement and buildings for lens flares. One of my favorite talks at Apple was on the process to create the ones from space. An incredible amount of work went into pulling those off just for a screen saver.
Unfortunately it was an internal only presentation. Really I had no idea you can basically rent the ISS and the crew in it. They all had to be trained on how to use the special camera system. If I remember correctly it was a custom made RED that has to be sent up in a payload. It was incredible.
Are you sure? There's a recent (2020) official Google blog where they state that they use satellite images as a fallback only for places that don't have "an established aerial survey market." It makes sense that aerial images would be more desirable.
The maximum resolution of satellite imagery is about half a meter. That is not due to sensor limitations, it’s because a satellite has to watch through the atmospheric distortion.
Satellite images can’t compete with aerial photography, unless you are trying to photograph an area where you can’t fly, such as in military applications, because in that case there just is no aerial photography.
That's not true. We know from trumps "leak" of a satellite photo showing an Iranian missile that there are satellites with resolutions at least as good as 7cm to 10cm
It is not in fact known that that photo was taken by a satellite, it is only known that around that time a spy satellite was in the sky in the direction of where the photo was taken. But it could also have been taken by other means.
The image is supposedly taken at a pretty big angle, yet shows a pretty much crystal clear image with no atmospheric distortion at all, of a scene in the desert. I’m not convinced. If this were possible, what would be keeping companies from commercializing it?
Here’s an interesting source though for computationally sharpening the images for static scenes:
Hmm, I'm curious about your first claim! I can't find anything more recent than ~2017[0], but they were still using Airplanes to gather imagery for the 3D maps. I'm pretty sure this is still the case, as urban area resolution is way higher than available non military satellite imagery.
Wasn't Bing Maps the first big player to offer 45-degree angle aerial imagery?
The article doesn't mention their "Bird’s Eye view" (airplane pics from 4 angles, not satellite), but I think I remember using it for some cities, before Google had it. Although I think it was short-lived. Google was focused on StreetView, iirc. After Keyhole.
I remember using the Microsoft aerial imagery in 2004 (that year corresponds to a certain year in high school when I used it for a class project). It wasn't "Bing" back then, but I remember it predating -- or at least having better-quality photos than -- Google Maps' aerial imagery.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 91.3 ms ] threadCapable governments should already have that sort of data, e.g. the Swiss one: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/maps-data-online/maps-geod...
> https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/3d-buildings/
There's just not a huge demand for higher quality imagery by the general public, and those industries who do need higher quality/georeferenced imagery are willing to pay for it.
Satellite images can’t compete with aerial photography, unless you are trying to photograph an area where you can’t fly, such as in military applications, because in that case there just is no aerial photography.
The image is supposedly taken at a pretty big angle, yet shows a pretty much crystal clear image with no atmospheric distortion at all, of a scene in the desert. I’m not convinced. If this were possible, what would be keeping companies from commercializing it?
Here’s an interesting source though for computationally sharpening the images for static scenes:
https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChanGroup/project_turbulence....
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suo_aUTUpps
The article doesn't mention their "Bird’s Eye view" (airplane pics from 4 angles, not satellite), but I think I remember using it for some cities, before Google had it. Although I think it was short-lived. Google was focused on StreetView, iirc. After Keyhole.
Around 2009? https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468196/bing-maps--mic...
Edit: I would love to read about the history of this space, if anyone knows of a good article/blog/book.
For a while, Terraserver was the biggest database on the web
With 5 terabytes of uncompressed image data, Microsoft TerraServer is bigger than all the HTML pages combined already on the Internet. [1998]
https://news.microsoft.com/1998/06/24/microsoft-partners-ann...
somewhat related - https://decider.com/2021/10/07/the-billion-dollar-code-netfl...