Re:Worldsheet: Wrapping the World in a 3D Sheet, View Synthe...
by crazygringo on Monday January 04, 2021 @06:03PM
(#25639525)
> They do use the Lidar data in the viewer.
Oh wow, you're right, I just tried it out. But it's so blocky and apparently limited to (mostly) 90° geometry, that I'd never realized Google was doing anything but modeling a one-size-fits-all "rectangular corridor" along each street.
It seems like it's not exposing any kind of raw Lidar data, but a very simple geometric simplification of it. (E.g. trees are either ignored completely, or if there are enough of them they're treated as the side of a building instead.)
I completely understand what you're saying about the problems with smearing and warping due to not enough data. But I still can't help but wonder what it would look like if they were able to generate a "raw" (but denoised) Lidar geometry, so that trees and cars were treated as individual objects, rather than just either as part of the street floor or part of the building walls they way they are now.
Oh wow, you're right, I just tried it out. But it's so blocky and apparently limited to (mostly) 90° geometry, that I'd never realized Google was doing anything but modeling a one-size-fits-all "rectangular corridor" along each street.
It seems like it's not exposing any kind of raw Lidar data, but a very simple geometric simplification of it. (E.g. trees are either ignored completely, or if there are enough of them they're treated as the side of a building instead.)
I completely understand what you're saying about the problems with smearing and warping due to not enough data. But I still can't help but wonder what it would look like if they were able to generate a "raw" (but denoised) Lidar geometry, so that trees and cars were treated as individual objects, rather than just either as part of the street floor or part of the building walls they way they are now.