2009/11/25 Jean-Marc Liotier <j...@liotier.org>: > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason's diary entry last week (http://j.mp/8ESP8o) > stired my interest. Using a few examples, he showed how mapping > everything as an area - or as a volume - makes ultimate sense. Should we > go for it now ?
The main usage for this that I see would be neat rendering. I'm not saying that's bad, rendering is important. But I think personally I'm going to wait for the real thing, a project to make a 3D model of the whole earth, really our world is not two-dimensional and it seems like a waste of time to put a lot of effort into the intermediate step between the street map and the model of the world. When I started mapping I made a point of adding the storeys count or height info for all buildings I drew with the intent to try a conversion to 3D at some point, later mapsurfer.net made me really happy by rendering the building heights before I had time to implement my idea. But the geeky part tells me it's a band-aid. Google got it with the crowd-sourcing of building models, but I think they don't have enough crowd-sourcing power yet to make the project take off and obviously they don't get it about open licensing and stuff. A couple of years ago there was also a project supported the Madrid municipality, Spain, to build a 3D model of the whole city with textures and stuff, but I don't know what came out of it. Now that microsoft and others have shown demos where they reconstruct models from a huge load of touristic pics or from recording with a special camera on google-street-view-like cars, I think we're close to be able to start such a project, with people building the necessary hardware like they build the RC planes to do aerial photography now, and the armchair mappers crowds filling in the details of the model, that's my vision anyway. Cheers _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
