Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vermeulen | Hacker News Reader

Take this idea, and apply it to Google Earth. Have it procedurally generate the rest of the data as I zoom in.

Its incredible I can check out my small home town on Google Earth now entirely in 3d (which wasnt the case just a few months ago). Yet the trees/cars are still these blocky low resolution things sticking out of the ground. Imagine Google Earth procedurally generating a high resolution mesh as I zoomed in. Train it with high resolution photogrammetry of other similar locations for the ground truth - and let me zoom in endless in their VR app

View on HN

I like that idea as a separate program (or just in the VR app) but I think it would be confusing/misleading in Google Earth itself. At the very least there needs to be a clear user-facing indication as to which content is procedurally generated (ie fictional) versus photographed (ie real). Obviously there’s a grey area with image processing but I think there’s a real concern with prioritizing nice pictures over actual information.

I believe Microsoft Flight Simulator does this (and it has VR support). It gets a bit tiring to see the same trees on every place on earth, though.

Their building gen is also super nice but it really takes away from the experience when flying a known location.

Yeah, going and flying over the small rural farm I grew up on I was disappointing since Flight Simulator had procedurally generated a whole compound full of random buildings that made it look like some cult compound.

What would be fun is the inverse. Feed in a section of Google Earth and have it generate a Minecraft world out the other end.

It appears that someone's worked that out.

reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/x56lg/using_google_earth_terrain_data_for_making_a/

This is fantastic, good find!

It's been a couple of years, but I still like the Outerra project. And also the Bohemia Interactive VBS.

In the works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_bW3ab8YAk

https://xkcd.com/1204/

Is this what https://earth2.io is doing?

a crypto scam isnt what i had in mind

No, that's probably a scam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaijNcRuzsQ

Reply on news.ycombinator.com