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veen  ·  2288 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post:

    ZOMFG WHEN WILL THIS GUY JUST HYPERVENTILATE HIMSELF INTO SHUTTING UP

I lol'ed. Have you seen his "Cartography in the age of AV's" post? You can mash PageDown like it's the beat to Darude's Sandstorm and still get the gist. (Which is: "cartography isn't dead but will adapt".)

I shared it because I had no idea they were conjuring up such detailed models using mostly CV and oblique imagery. It's processing, and it's Google, but still incredibly impressive when you consider all the ways that could go wrong. I mean, look at how difficult 3D was for Apple.

    The only thing Apple doesn't have is the hand-pieced stuff that allows them to verify they got it right. [...] Apple could try and catch up, but they aren't.

Isn't the question whether they ever will have this? Like you said, Google has deeper pockets and clearly has more than enough skin in the game. At the same time, there are commercial entities like Cyclomedia that I've used who collect Street View photos and imagery (including oblique) every year at resolutions better than Google does. Their Street View is every three meters, every image 100 megapixels. I think getting the data is a logistics problem, which is right up Apple's alley. Really big image and geospatial data processing, on the other hand? I'm not sure if Apple has the chops to integrate all of that data. It's about as far away from their core business as Apple could get (save for the Apple car itself).