Authors:
Franz W. Leberl
1
and
Michael Gruber
2
Affiliations:
1
Graz University of Technology, Austria
;
2
Microsoft Photogrammetry, Austria
Keyword(s):
Internet, Geo-data, Photogrammetry, 3-dimensional objects.
Abstract:
The Internet has inspired an enormous appetite for 3-dimensional geo-data of the urban environment to
support location-aware applications. This has in fact become the surprising „killer application“ of such 3-
dimensional data. In March 2005, at the occasion of his 50th birthday, Bill Gates went public with his
“Virtual Earth Vision” for local search in the Internet and stated: "You'll be walking around in downtown
London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the
merchandise. Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality
walkthrough.”
The key words are „walk in a shop“. This implies the need for an enormous detail, and the associated
computing power, communications bandwidth, miniaturization of computing, increase of storage capacity
and in the ability to model the human habitat (the Earth) in great detail in 3 dimensions.
This paper seeks to evangelize the current capabili
ties of the Virtual Earth system, focuses on the creation of
3D data, but also points to some pieces of new science in the 3D-analysis of overlapping imagery of the
human habitat at sub-pixel accuracies.
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