Thursday, May 05, 2005
Create a 3d map of a city within hours...
Those crazy (like a fox!) professors at UC Berkeley have engineered a way to quickly model a city by using lasers and digital cameras mounted to the back of a truck that trolls through the neighborhood. The laser measures distances to and from the buildings, lamp posts and such while the camera takes 2D pictures. Those measurments and pictures going into a computer that then generates the landscape based on the data it gets. They were able to generate a working model of downtown Derkeley in 4.5 hours, with 4 hours of that time dedicated to data processing. This has a lot of obvious military applications but I think it could also be great for people who work for the city. Like emergency professionals and the like. Maybe a truck could continually troll the city to keep an eye on street conditions or Google could use it with their existing Google Maps technology to enable us to zoom in even further. That would be kewl. Article here. ¶ 12:13 PM
Those crazy (like a fox!) professors at UC Berkeley have engineered a way to quickly model a city by using lasers and digital cameras mounted to the back of a truck that trolls through the neighborhood. The laser measures distances to and from the buildings, lamp posts and such while the camera takes 2D pictures. Those measurments and pictures going into a computer that then generates the landscape based on the data it gets. They were able to generate a working model of downtown Derkeley in 4.5 hours, with 4 hours of that time dedicated to data processing. This has a lot of obvious military applications but I think it could also be great for people who work for the city. Like emergency professionals and the like. Maybe a truck could continually troll the city to keep an eye on street conditions or Google could use it with their existing Google Maps technology to enable us to zoom in even further. That would be kewl. Article here. ¶ 12:13 PM
