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What about "Haha, Well you're certainly not going to create a 3D point cloud of every street in the world"...

Google's self driving cars are just doing that.

EDIT: I can't find the post I once read, but this post also makes some clear: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130502024505-99...

EDIT 2: Here a video of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk @ 3:30 you can see the generated (and stored) point cloud.

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That bit blew my mind.

I'd love to see some of those point clouds. Maybe Google has an artist-in-residence who could 3D print varies landmark locations?

That was actually a little bit sobering for me. I thought the AI techniques they use were much more general, autonomous and independent of map data. I didn’t know that location information of traffic signs, pavement etc. are taken from map data. But it makes sense to prefer data from most reliable sources.

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