Georgia Tech’s Real-time Google Earth

Researchers at Georgia Tech have modified Google Earth to integrate information obtained through automatic analysis of video camera footage, creating a somewhat real-time Google Earth showing the locations of cars and people.

They use motion capture data to help their animated humans move realistically, and were able to extrapolate cars’ motion throughout an entire stretch of road from just a few spotty camera angles.

From their video of an augmented virtual Earth, you can see if the pickup soccer game in the park is short a player, how traffic is on the highway, and how fast the wind is blowing the clouds across the sky.

Their work will be presented as a paper at the upcoming IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality next month, but you can read a draft PDF here.  See  a video demonstration after the break.

via Augmented Google Earth Gets Real-Time People, Cars, Clouds | Popular Science.

About the Author: Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Science google, google earth, imageprocessing, realtime