Google Earth has always been cool — aside from making you see what the house looks like from all the way up there, it’s a great research tool when it comes to, say, looking for the best place to travel next year or seeing what a specific area of town looks like today. Recently Georgia Tech researchers have made Google Earth even more interesting — by adding real-time people, clouds, and cars.
As cool as Google Earth is, staring at photo stills can get pretty uninteresting after a while. This is where G-Tech’s recent innovations come in — by adding some movement in the shots, you can see just how busy that highway intersection is, or if a particular spot in the country has fair or cloudy weather. It’s so accurate that you can supposedly see if a team in a pickup football game at the park is short by one player.
The G-Tech researchers use live video feeds to help create the real-time information about people, clouds, and cars, and then layer it onto Google Earth. The dynamic additions are often extrapolated from video feeds shot from many angles — the motion of cars, for instance, can be presented with only a few camera angles.
The researchers are now looking to add objects such as birds, motion in rivers, and actual weather. Very cool.
