From SiliconValleyWatcher.com comes the news that Google is creating a system of laser tracing the homes of city residents in order to create a 3D representation of their already-online maps service. Competitors in the field of localisation inlude Amazon.com’s A9 service that displays photos of an area dependent on the tags and links to them found on the web, whilst Microsoft’s MSN Search is planning on taking photographs at a 45 degree angle to give a more realistic view of a neighborhood, as opposed current mapping’s top down approach which utilises satellite technology. MSN’s service will be called MSN Virtual Earth and is expected to launch sometime in the summer.
All the major search engines are attempting to make their results more relevant to the everyday user, as seen by the ability to find taxi rides from Google Labs trialing service “Google Ride Finder” which tracks the vehicle’s actual location, as well as the local business information from Google Maps which is provided in the UK by The Yellow Pages as public internet information isn’t comprehensive enough as yet.
The original siliconvalleywatcher report mentions problems such as other parked cars and vans that could get in the way of the photographing trucks that would trundle the streets. Google’s aim is apparently to accomplish their scanning in a single pass, perhaps using technology created by the Stanford University Graphics department, the University that both Google founders attended. In their trails of the technology in San Francisco, Google will have to correct problems with perspective and changes in this when scanning with a moving truck, but other projects with the Graphics department could be of use, as in using mulitiple camera arrays to look around objects.
The 128 video cameras in our array can be arranged and used in a variety of ways. In the image above, the cameras are arranged 2 inches apart and aimed so that their fields of view overlap completely about 10 feet from the array. This arrangement simulates a single camera with an aperture 3 feet wide, allowing us to see through partly occluding environments like foliage and crowds.
The Stanford Multi-Camera Array
SiliconValleyWatcher.com
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