Below is the flythrough movie of Virtual London circa 2005 by CASA. Created using a mix of high resolution panoramas, ray tracing and of course the 3D model it provided a phase one demonstrator. The models extent now extends to the M25.
– Note as with most of our movies they now contain audio –
Research work continues on rapid photomodelling and of course we have it in Google Earth but are still working on the licensing issues…
Any thoughts or comments on the flythough are of course welcome..
Following our own first steps in Second Life, documented in the video below, it is worth expanding this to look at the creation of real world cities.
The movie below by Sufis Angel, demonstrates the construction, using a collaborative tool set, of Las Vegas. Sadly Second Life does not allow the user to import their own models when compared to, for example, ActiveWorlds. It does however allow texture import, a set of facade photographs could easily be imported from say our London dataset to construct sections of the city in Second Life.
As has been mentioned before if you merged Second Life with Google Earth you would have a killer application…
If you have Second Life installed you can teleport direct to Las Vegas
Ok so this is a bit an academic blog, but sometimes on a Friday when its warm outside and your working on an easy route from 3DMax to Google Earth you just click the ‘place’ button and see where the model lands.
In our case the model landed in Mid America and raised a smile so if you want to see the number 134 London bus from North Finchley on its way to New Mexico then click the file download below.
On a more serious note it shows how not only building models are of use when photomapped and if we can get some sort of animation system running on route paths it might be possible to get buses driving round London. If you could then link them with the GPS feed then it suddenly become a real-time transport model but thats some way off.
You can download the kmz file to fly into the model in Google Earth here (6mb)
Maybe it just us, but we sometimes look at paintings and think wouldn’t it be great to flyinside that scene. So, using a section of Visscher’s panoramic view of London circa 1616, we put in lines of perspective and traced around the main features.
As the movie above shows you can then create a 3D flythough or indeed a full 3D model. We also put the painting into ActiveWorlds with avatars a while ago and its kind of interesting to not only have 3D art but also see people walking around a picture.
This would seem to be of use for multimedia applications in galleries etc… its neat but seems to be one of things that sits on our hard drive and never gets out of the lab.. still least now its on YourTube.. Soundtrack is Beethoven, Sonata nr.8 in G-Major btw.
Comments as ever welcome…