Google deploying planes over cities for 3D maps (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Google deploying planes over cities for 3D maps (2012)

reuters.com

39 pointsandima30 comments

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.

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.

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.

Might have been Terraserver? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com

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...

God, I remember when it launched and how big a Terabyte seemed. Now the Google home page is about a Terabyte of Javascript.

> I would love to read about the history of this space, if anyone knows of a good article/blog/book.

2012 Google seemed hungrier and more ambitious than 2022 Google.

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.

I thought the biggest issue with higher quality imagery had more to do with governments than interest (privacy legislation, national security, etc).

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.

Do you by chance have a link to that talk?

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:

https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChanGroup/project_turbulence....

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.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suo_aUTUpps

That's because they ate in between that time period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suo_aUTUpps

Do any of these platforms provide SDKs for integration / other access to their 3D maps? I needed it for a project and couldn't find any.

https://www.nearmap.com/ though they seem to have moved away from flat pricing to "contact us" which is a shame.

(2012)

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.

Capable governments should already have that sort of data, e.g. the Swiss one: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/maps-data-online/maps-geod...

is using Mapbox for this feature.

> https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/3d-buildings/

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.

Which comments here?

The article was written 10 years ago.

Which was not originally in the title....

No, they're simply talking about Google doing it. Why can't that be without people such as yourself bring up Apple, etc?

The article date is 2012 mate, relax

Apple bought C3 Technologies in 2011, that's where they got their 3D aerial imagery processing from.

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