Googling the Future

For a great example of the benefits of 3d and virtual environments, take a look at the new addition to Google Earth recently reported in an article by a Bay Area ABC affiliate.

Google Earth has become a great tool for interactively viewing existing structures and topology, but the truly novel step comes in integrating future structures with the existing world. Google has done just that by adding models (provided by Caltrans) of the yet-to-be-completed Bay Bridge over the existing virtual San Francisco Bay.

From the article:

Until now, Google Earth had a policy of showing only completed structures, for an accurate picture of the earth. But along with adding 3D images, Google has decided to go into the fourth dimension -- time. The bridge is the future, Ancient Rome is in the past.

"I would like to do more of the past, more of the future, to make Google Earth not just everywhere, but every when. A time travel machine for people to understand their heritage, and their future," said [Google CTO Michael] Jones.

I hope this is not just an idle PR statement. Google Earth over time (Google History?) would be an amazing and unprecedented educational tool. The amount of data that could be incorporated is almost unfathomable. The movement of land masses, industrialization, perhaps even battle re-enactments. If anybody can do it, I believe it will be these guys. Fingers crossed!

Emerging Tech: VideoTrace

Creating great looking real-time ready models of complex objects is getting easier and easier.

Anton van den Hengel of the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies is leading the development of an amazing new process that allows you to easily create 3d models from video. The process - called 'VideoTrace' - debuted last year at SIGGRAPH and involves interactively tracing the desired object over several frames of video.

Check out a very cool demo video here or here.

Image processing algorithms have existed for years that attempt to automatically detect and generate 3d meshes from a set of images. Examples of successful implementations are found in medicine and geology, where data sets involve known components with little variation. The limiting factor in taking this idea to general use has primarily been the ambiguities (jitter, fade, artifacts, etc.) of an undefined visual source.

VideoTrace compensates for these shortcomings by providing an interface for the user to interactively trace the desired object in the video. These tracings give hints to the algorithms about what should be processed and (theoretically) remove the major ambiguities. A paper describing the technology can be found here.

A note on the ACVT VideoTrace page says that they are currently looking for support for commercial development. I sure hope they get it. Even though models of some small objects would still be easier to generate with a low-end 3d scanner, the applications for this technology on a large scale are huge. Think of a bridge between Google Streetwise and Google Earth - users could quickly trace the video of all the houses on their block and have it uploaded for use in Google Earth.... The possibilities are many!

A 3D World

In a couple of weeks (May 12th), international industry leaders and other 3D proponents and interested entities will meet in São Paulo, Brazil for what is being called the 'X3D Earth' initiative.

Web3d.org lists the purpose of the X3D Earth group as being: "to create an infrastructure of open and extensible standards to visualize in three dimension objects from real world and constructions of information in a geospatial referenced context." This infrastructure will presumably be based on X3D and has the somewhat lofty goal of compiling and archiving all available (public and government controlled) terrain, imagery, and cartography data.

While I'm all for the ideas behind this initiative (open and centralized access to spatial data), isn't this sort of re-inventing the wheel? I realize Google's data isn't exactly 'open and accessible,' but they seem to have had great success implementing an architecture that fits many of X3D Earth's goals and has been proven popular and successful with users. With Google Earth's large user base and ever-growing repository of geospatial referenced content, would a functional X3D Earth implementation be able to reach the critical mass of users needed to be successful?

Maybe someone over at Google will take notice - it would be great to see some sort of collaboration here. I think everyone would benefit from improved data access and standardization and we wouldn't have to watch the death of another well intentioned Web3D initiative!