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Comment by waltbosz | Hacker News Reader

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.

This demo reminds me of that dream.

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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.

AI upscaling with diffusion models will probably solve that problem.

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.

photogrammetry is old. Check out NERF. https://youtu.be/DJ2hcC1orc4

LiDAR-mounted drones are available, although a ground-level thingy can also generate neat point clouds in its vicinity: https://enterprise-insights.dji.com/blog/lidar-equipped-uavs

The old 1989 Dos game called Vette let you drive around San Francisco in 3D. To a young kid living in San Francisco with a 286, this was perfection.

I've been looking for a game that lets me drive around real towns ever since.

True Crime modeled LA 1:1 although the game didn’t do that much with it.

Also, GTA V doesn’t model LA 1:1 but holy fuck it’s practically LA.

This was my first job, 22 years ago. Ended up as something called My World, which then became eegeo, and now WRLD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MyWorld https://www.wrld3d.com

Didn't really end up going anywhere.

The Getaway was the first game that I remember doing this. As a Brit, being able to hare around my capital city like a hooligan was inexhaustible fun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Getaway_(video_game)

Playing the new Gran Turismo on the PSVR2 setup makes me think this isn't as far off as it feels. Surprisingly immersive game.

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