What if we had an accessible and accurate digital replica of the world? What could we make from it and what new knowledge could we create? Online maps and virtual globes are now becoming common visualization tools for geographic content and immersive geo-referenced imagery is providing a new way to experience the world from a street level perspective.
Anthony Fassero co-founder of Earth Mine inc presents an insight into using spatially referenced panoramas for tagging data:
Taken from O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, Burlingame, CA, May 13, 2008 Earth Mine is shaping to be one of the most exciting technologies since the release of Google Earth for spatial information.
We have covered Earth Mine for a while and according the website API products will be in private beta during the summer of 2008 (ie now). Those interested in the beta can apply online.
See http://www.earthmine.com/ for more information.
EarthMine looks like they are doing some interesting stuff. I really like how one can measure anything one sees in a panorama view. This can prove invaluable when creating context models for 3D visualization.
To me, the most powerful feature of their technology (as I understand it) would be to enable one to merge panoramas of existing conditions with 3D models of new interventions.
We are constantly engaged in creating before and after images to convey our design intent. These can be tedious to set up in a 3D environment (using photo matching) and only support 1 static view at a time. What’s more, foreground content from existing conditions needs to be masked manually.
Since their technology appears to make use of real 3D coordinates for each panorama, I suspect it would be possible to view 3D building designs either in front of or behind existing buildings simply by comparing the relative distance from the camera (a kind of z-buffering if you will)?
Being able to ‘walk’ an existing street augmented with a new design intervention (which could be toggled on and off) seems to me like the ultimate before and after visualization. However, I have not seen any mention of this on their site – so perhaps it’s not possible.