Number of 3D cities in MS2020? - use Earth View 3D to see them!

[turnandbank 243]

6 minutes ago, bonchie said:

Of note is that these aren't just city centers. I just went about 15 miles away from Seattle's needle and the houses are still in 3D. Same for Miami.

Didn't try any others.

This does vary by city. Some have wider coverage than others. The USA has, by far, the most cities with this type of 3D technology. Calgary Alberta, for example, only has a little beyond the downtown area covered. There are also a lot of issues with color variations in the underlying ortho images in many cities and regions. I hope their AI will correct some of these discrepancies to improve the match. This is something I have done manually for many tiles in the making of my own Ortho4XP scenery collection. 

Clearly, for this to work well, there needs to be a plausible alternative to the full 3D areas, otherwise the transition will be jarring and take away immersion. I speculate that, outside the 3D areas, buildings will be added based other available data similar to what W2XP and ORBX's True Earth Series are able to do. 

Perhaps they can even produce their own data for placing buildings and trees accurately by using AI to scan the orthophotos and determine the positions and footprints. Pure speculation on my part, as I have no idea if this is possible yet, but have always wondered if it could be done.

Something else I definitely want is an accurate road network wherever I fly, not roads that are baked into the textures as they are currently with landclass based scenery.

Based on the the trailer, I still think X-Planes night lighting system looks superior the the upcoming MFS, but I know it is not even in beta yet. Otherwise , it does look visually stunning and as most of you here, I look forward to learning more about it.

 

[bonchie 2,305]

1 minute ago, turnandbank said:

This does vary by city. Some have wider coverage than others. The USA has, by far, the most cities with this type of 3D technology. Calgary Alberta, for example, only has a little beyond the downtown area covered. There are also a lot of issues with color variations in the underlying ortho images in many cities and regions. I hope their AI will correct some of these discrepancies to improve the match. This is something I have done manually for many tiles in the making of my own Ortho4XP scenery collection. 

Clearly, for this to work well, there needs to be a plausible alternative to the full 3D areas, otherwise the transition will be jarring and take away immersion. I speculate that, outside the 3D areas, buildings will be added based other available data similar to what W2XP and ORBX's True Earth Series are able to do. 

Perhaps they can even produce their own data for placing buildings and trees accurately by using AI to scan the orthophotos and determine the positions and footprints. Pure speculation on my part, as I have no idea if this is possible yet, but have always wondered if it could be done.

Something else I definitely want is an accurate road network wherever I fly, not roads that are baked into the textures as they are currently with landclass based scenery.

Based on the the trailer, I still think X-Planes night lighting system looks superior the the upcoming MFS, but I know it is not even in beta yet. Otherwise , it does look visually stunning and as most of you here, I look forward to learning more about it.

 

Check my post above.

Dubai is not in 3D at all in Bing, yet it was in the trailer in spectacular detail. They've got something figured out to fill in all the gaps in a plausible way.

Edited June 14, 2019 by bonchie

[ca_metal 2,015]

5 minutes ago, bonchie said:

Check my post above.

Dubai is not in 3D at all in Bing, yet it was in the trailer in spectacular detail. They've got something figured out to fill in all the gaps in a plausible way.

It may not have the 3d satellite view, but it definitely has some sort of buildings on the map view. Apparently with accurate shapes and heights.

 

 

And a lot of other cities have those shapes in the map view, but they don't have the satellite 3d view. London, Paris among others. 

Like I said before, a lot of data isn't shown to us. They said they have 2 Petabytes of data. I doubt what we see in the free version of bing has it all available to us.

Edited June 14, 2019 by ca_metal

[bonchie 2,305]

1 minute ago, ca_metal said:

It may not have the 3d satellite view, but it definitely has some sort of buildings on the map view. Apparently with accurate shapes and heights.

 

Map view, it's totally flat.

I'm not sure how they are getting those heights in the non-satellite view. It has to be something different than real 3D scans like Houston, Seattle, Miami, etc. that show full fidelity in 3D map view. Otherwise, Dubai would be in both versions.

If it's the AI that's able to produce that, it's pretty exciting stuff.

Edited June 14, 2019 by bonchie

[ca_metal 2,015]

2 minutes ago, bonchie said:

Map view, it's totally flat.

I'm not sure how they are getting those heights in the non-satellite view. It has to be something different than real 3D scans like Houston, Seattle, Miami, etc. that show full fidelity in 3D map view. Otherwise, Dubai would be in both versions.

If it's the AI that's able to produce that, it's pretty exciting stuff.

This picture I put above is the map view, you can see buildings, houses, comercial buildings spreaded for the whole city of Dubai. I'm using the maps software that comes with Windows 10 to visualize it.

[bonchie 2,305]

2 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

This picture I put above is the map view, you can see buildings, houses, comercial buildings spreaded for the whole city of Dubai. I'm using the maps software that comes with Windows 10 to visualize it.

I mean 3D Satellite view in the app. Dubai is flat in it.

That's why I'm speculating that the AI is producing the building shapes and heights in what you posted. If it was 3D scans, they'd be in the 3D satellite view in the app like Seattle, Miami, etc.

Edited June 14, 2019 by bonchie

[bonchie 2,305]

45 minutes ago, ganter said:

That's great for you guys across the pond. In London - if you go a mile and a half away from Buckingham Palace it all goes to cock (2D).

Luckily, I love flying in the States, especially in the Rockies.

US coverage must be a lot better. I just checked ABQ, a much more modest city, and the coverage still doesn't end for like 20 miles to the south.

Amazingly, it goes 46 miles in another direction all the way to Jarales, NM.

This is one reason I'm hoping this is actually a subscription service and not a one time buy. All this data is going to expand over the next 5 years and I'd love to be able to keep updating it.

That may be MS's hook. You can buy the base game, but they make the lion's share of their money on recurring $5 a month subscriptions or something.

Edited June 14, 2019 by bonchie

[ca_metal 2,015]

8 minutes ago, bonchie said:

I mean 3D Satellite view in the app. Dubai is flat in it.

That's why I'm speculating that the AI is producing the building shapes and heights in what you posted. If it was 3D scans, they'd be in the 3D satellite view in the app like Seattle, Miami, etc.

Or they've made the decision not to make everything available on the free version of it. They have subscriptions to use their services and as I said before, I don't think our free versions of bing contain 2 Petabetas of data, not even close to that. What we see there is just a little taste of their tech. 

All above is just my personal opinion, I don't know anyone that has used their paid satellite services nor I have used myself.

Edited June 14, 2019 by ca_metal

[krazyk 157]

1 hour ago, bonchie said:

Dubai is not in 3D at all in Bing, yet it was in the trailer in spectacular detail. They've got something figured out to fill in all the gaps in a plausible way.

While Dubai is featured in the trailer, the Palm Island itself looks quite a bit older than what it is presently. I don't think I even saw the Atlantis hotel at the top end of the Palm Islands which is probably the most iconic building on the entire island.

Add to that the buildings on Sheikh Zayed Rd, you can see (viewed on the lower left around 0:46 in the trailer) there are structures/buildings present but they are not accurate to their real-world counterpart or detailed enough to be part of an authentic 3D scan which leads me to believe that it's either part of their filler autogen as was the case with all previous flight sims from MS or the more likely scenario is that it's still largely a WIP and I hope details will be added/corrected once the larger chunks of the product are developed.

Judging from the current trailer entirely, you have a better representation of Dubai from FlyTampa Dubai Rebooted (excluding the now almost antique airport layout).

Edited June 14, 2019 by krazyk

[tonywob 4,768]

11 hours ago, ca_metal said:

Or they've made the decision not to make everything available on the free version of it. They have subscriptions to use their services and as I said before, I don't think our free versions of bing contain 2 Petabetas of data, not even close to that. What we see there is just a little taste of their tech. 

I don't see the sense why they'd deliberately hide useful mapping data from their Bing mapping service, especially when they are competing with Google and Apple in this space. The subscription based Azure service includes the same data but in a more useful format for commercial customers, e.g. routing data for roads, speed limits, attributes on buildings etc and an API to access it.. The bing maps application uses all this data and displays it in a format that is useful for how users use it, and just as plain tiled images. If you want deeper access to the data and not just tile map images, then you pay for this data, and MSFS2020 is likely using the same data but in a rather interesting way (e.g. To produce road traffic)

 

[ca_metal 2,015]

2 hours ago, tonywob said:

I don't see the sense why they'd deliberately hide useful mapping data from their Bing mapping service, especially when they are competing with Google and Apple in this space. The subscription based Azure service includes the same data but in a more useful format for commercial customers, e.g. routing data for roads, speed limits, attributes on buildings etc and an API to access it.. The bing maps application uses all this data and displays it in a format that is useful for how users use it, and just as plain tiled images. If you want deeper access to the data and not just tile map images, then you pay for this data, and MSFS2020 is likely using the same data but in a rather interesting way (e.g. To produce road traffic)

 

So why Dubai was filled with autogen buildings when you can see they have the actual shape and height of the buildings in the bing maps (not the satellite)? Maybe an work in progress scenery?

[tonywob 4,768]

11 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

So why Dubai was filled with autogen buildings when you can see they have the actual shape and height of the buildings in the bing maps (not the satellite)?

It's probably using something like CityGML (which has various LOD levels). At LOD1 it's basically just a block with a height attribute, LOD2 gives it some shape for the roof, etc... If they used the LOD1 data in the simulator then it would just be block autogen as we're used to (i.e. 3D buildings protruded from a building footprint), LOD2 would give the building a more recognisable shape, but it would still be generic textures. There are many commercial (and free sources) out there that offer CityGML data at various LODs, so this is nothing new and has been around for years( e.g. You can download for free some nice detailed CityGML files for Berlin)

[RVBldr 3]

On 6/14/2019 at 5:43 AM, fta2017 said:

If you want to see the tech being used in MS2020 it is based on Bing and Azure, the exact same technology used to drive the Windows 10 Store App called Earth View - Map 3D. When visiting the locations shown the trailer in this app, they are pixel-for-pixel identical.

The app streams data to your PC in the exact same way as Google Earth 3D does. I expect that the simulator will likely allow users to set a local disk cache size so when revisiting a city the data does not have to be re-streamed. /end_speculation 😉 

To download this free app:

1. Windows 10 - Microsoft Store

2. Search for "Earth View"

3. Install the app 

 

Just for info, you don't need to download the app as above. If you're running Win10, just go to the Programs and type Maps. You'll see the same data. 

[mazex 419]

Getting the "full 3D" cities in Google relies on special planes taking 45 degree angle aerial photos mixed with satelite photos to be able to produce the "sides" of the buildings etc. No AI can get this from a satelite photo... Look at some Google or Bing 3D imagery and you realize that you see signs on walls beneath overhanging building parts that a satelite would never get.

So getting the full earth the same way as Huston is unfortunately not going to happen - even if you put a massive AI cluster on the task... So for the majority of the world we will get imagery generated in a much "cruder" way I suppose.

It might be possible to take 45 degree angle photos from satelites, but not yet to my understanding. Need to check with my Google contacts ;)

Edited June 18, 2019 by mazex

[Ident 198]

Honestly the cities are nice, but I am more interested in the airports. My habit of flying is going from airport to airport in GA planes and I dont spend much time down low looking at cities.