Google Earth Adds 3-D Trees 95
terrancem writes "Google has populated several major cities with more than 80 million virtual trees based on an automated process that identifies trees in satellite images. The realistic 3D representations are based on actual tree species found in urban areas. But Google has also extended realistic tree coverage to rainforests in Africa, Mexico, and the Amazon."
Re:not good for scouting from Google Earth (Score:2, Informative)
They do, you don't even have to RTFA, it's in the summary:
based on an automated process that identifies trees in satellite images
Elsewhere in virtual globes... (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, that's a bit off-topic, but not that much when we discuss virtual globes and the likes. Here's a dismissed submission last week [slashdot.org] that I think worthy of sharing: "It's a dream come true. After MapQuest [mapquest.com] and Yahoo [highearthorbit.com] actively supporting the Wikipedia-like map initiative OpenStreetMap.org [openstreetmap.org]. Microsoft announced that they hired OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast for their Bing Maps team [bing.com]. But there's more, they committed providing orthorectified aerial imagery and more to the project. From the official announcement: "Continuously innovating and improving our map data is a top priority and a massive undertaking at Bing. That's why we're excited to announce a new initiative to work with the OpenStreetMap project, a community of more than 320,000 people who have built high quality maps for every country on earth. Microsoft is providing access to our Bing Aerial Imagery for use in the OpenStreetMap project, and we have hired industry veteran Steve Coast to lead this effort. [...] As a first step in this engagement, we plan to enable access to Bing's global orthorectified aerial imagery, as a backdrop of OSM editors. Also, Microsoft is working on new tools to better enable contributions to OSM." Microsoft already added the OpenStreetMap layer to Bing Maps last August [bing.com]."
Clearly, this means to me that open data has won that round and that Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ are in deeper trouble today than a few months ago.
Now to go back to Google, at the moment, but it could change anytime, they're going on a different road away from OpenStreetMap with their Google Map Maker.
Re:Outdated imagery (Score:2, Informative)
Yes.