We met with the nice people at C3 last week and they kindly provided a walk through of their latest city modelling technology and its impressive:
The movie above provides a glimpse of the output which interestingly is not dependent on LiDAR. C3 capture the data using calibrated cameras that for every picture knows the positions at angles of capture at a high precision. This enables each pixel to have a known geographical position with decimeter accuracy and thus using a combination of images a 3D model can be produced.
The company has just released their Oslo model and it is well worth taking a look at.
See http://kart.sesam.no/3d/ for a 3D flythough (Windows only at the moment) and http://www.c3technologies.com for more info.
Thanks go to Frank at the Google Earth blog for the email prompt to put up a post on it 🙂
Read their blog entry about their new 3D service in english here: http://labs.finn.no/blog/sesam-3d-map-3d-revolution-people
That is TRULY impressive. I knew that a technique like that would be a reality eventually just wasn’t expecting it so soon. Wow.
Google oughta contract them to do N.America or buy ’em out.
Well, go and get some example data. You will see that it is very nice from a birds eyes perspective, but if you go closer you will see that the geometry is by far not that accurate as it looks like. Nevertheless I like that the vegetation is also represented in 3d, which really makes a big difference!
With respect to Google and North America – have a look at: http://pictometry.com/government/product_3d.shtml – I have seen several examples at the URISA conference in New Orleans. I think their (building) models are very impressive!