Hey Todd!  long time no see (speak? ).  Glad to see you again.   I also got the feeling our posts being deleted wasnt an accident.  kinda weird.  it was just our opinions and thoughts.  Oh well.

I am curious to see how MS will deal with a lack of quality of available orthophotos.

I often fly in Alaska and the quality of Bing-Maps there is not always great (e.g. just west / north-west of Palmer or the glachiers eastof Juneau). I really hope that we will see something that comes close to the magic that they can do with the cities...

Many happy landings!

DocBird

3 minutes ago, DocBird said:

I am curious to see how MS will deal with a lack of quality of available orthophotos.

I often fly in Alaska and the quality of Bing-Maps there is not always great (e.g. just west / north-west of Palmer or the glachiers eastof Juneau). I really hope that we will see something that comes close to the magic that they can do with the cities...

Many happy landings!

DocBird

I was surprised to see not so bad orthos in some places in PNG and Sulawesi in Bing. At least some orthos that you can work on to polish the strip and add huts.

4 minutes ago, domkle said:

I was surprised to see not so bad orthos in some places in PNG and Sulawesi in Bing. At least some orthos that you can work on to polish the strip and add huts.

Yes, I agree: Sometimes the Bing-maps are surprisingly good. But what will they are not so well?

I hope they do not forget about us and all of us Return-to-Misty-Moorings-Fans.

On 10/4/2019 at 11:47 PM, TuFun said:

 

Bush flights with the Beaver would be great! 

 

A lot a pro bush flyers in PNG or Papua use turbine aircraft like the Kodiak, the late Porter and  the P750 and lot of them have a glass cockpit. 

On 10/4/2019 at 2:41 PM, domkle said:

I am with you here. I don't know whether the autogen will be up to it in Africa, PNG or the Solomons . but I think that many of us are ready to do some extra work if we have the SDK tools for it. And I hope that the Orbx two PNG sceneries will be adapted !

Also add Idaho to Alaska ! 

As far as I understood from the interview AVSIM conducted, AZURE AI detects and tags anything in the aerial/satellite data MS has. They mentioned 7 days for an unbelievable amount of trees (forgot the exact number) worldwide.

They also talked about collecting infos related to the buildings roofs etc.

So if they use this AI process, I think they can tag all the infrastructure on the Bing aerial data and create multiple "autogen" types for any area of the world where Photogrammetry is not available, placed where they should and with a very plausible architecture based on the tags the AI collects. 

4 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

So if they use this AI process, I think they can tag all the infrastructure on the Bing aerial data and create multiple "autogen" types for any area of the world where Photogrammetry is not available, placed where they should and with a very plausible architecture based on the tags the AI collects. 

This is so exciting and cool.

This should allow them to create much more region/location specific things on their end and we get the benefit of never having to do updates or new scenery add-on purchases on our end.

 

Incredibly cool!

6 minutes ago, irrics said:

This is so exciting and cool.

This should allow them to create much more region/location specific things on their end and we get the benefit of never having to do updates or new scenery add-on purchases on our end.

 

Incredibly cool!

Also, I am curious to know if the AI can also anaylze and estimate the height of the infrastructure based on the shadow vs time the aerial image was captured 🙂 

Another clue could be the type of building based on many other factors like estimated footprint area, similar infrastructure around etc. etc. 

It could be also guessed from the land classification data available used in conjunction with the collected AI tags.

In any case, this is a fascinating thing to hear as a scenery developer myself. In fact my area of interest will be most probably not part of the Photogrammetry data but rather the procedural one.

If this is the case, my X-Plane 11 scenery could be adapted to the new MSFS.

14 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

As far as I understood from the interview AVSIM conducted, AZURE AI detects and tags anything in the aerial/satellite data MS has. They mentioned 7 days for an unbelievable amount of trees (forgot the exact number) worldwide.

They also talked about collecting infos related to the buildings roofs etc.

So if they use this AI process, I think they can tag all the infrastructure on the Bing aerial data and create multiple "autogen" types for any area of the world where Photogrammetry is not available, placed where they should and with a very plausible architecture based on the tags the AI collects. 

Hence why I think regional sceneries will be no longer needed. As I don’t see how the scenery devs like Orbx with a lot less resources can do better than that.

 Which I think would be the way to adapt to that new reality would be developing smaller but handmade scenery of the airports and the surrounds, like a small portion of the city near that airport.

2 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

Also, I am curious to know if the AI can also anaylze and estimate the height of the infrastructure based on the shadow vs time the aerial image was captured 🙂 

Another clue could be the type of building based on many other factors like estimated footprint area, similar infrastructure around etc. etc. 

It could be also guessed from the land classification data available used in conjunction with the collected AI tags.

In any case, this is a fascinating thing to hear as a scenery developer myself. In fact my area of interest will be most probably not part of the Photogrammetry data but rather the procedural one.

If this is the case, my X-Plane 11 scenery could be adapted to the new MSFS.

In theory, with time, they can improve things teaching more techniques to the machine. Also the data available on Bing will improve with time.

As they already pointed out, the world scenery will be constantly updated.

4 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

Hence why I think regional sceneries will be no longer needed. As I don’t see how the scenery devs like Orbx with a lot less resources can do better than that.

 Which I think would be the way to adapt to that new reality would be developing smaller but handmade scenery of the airports and the surrounds, like a small portion of the city near that airport.

I agree, this will remove a lot of stress and complexity from the (freeware) projects people like me develop. Yes in this case we will focus on the airports as well as the landmarks.

Speaking of Orbx, as far as I understood from the interview, I had the feeling the non photogrammetry areas will be more or less in the quality and style of what Orbx did for X-Plane 11 lately and if this is the case then the simulator will have (with or without photogrammetry) a rich wonderful virtual world to explore.

40 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

 

Can't way to see how Azure handles PNG hut roofs, some of rusted metal sheets, some of branches and grass . And the cosy colonial bungalows 😉.

That goes for alot of countries. Reminds me of just one city. All in one place. Manila

6 minutes ago, Casualcas said:

That goes for alot of countries. Reminds me of just one city. All in one place. Manila

Indeed but we are talking bush flying that is searching for a red strip knifing the jungle open and the tiny village around. 

43 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

I agree, this will remove a lot of stress and complexity from the (freeware) projects people like me develop. Yes in this case we will focus on the airports as well as the landmarks.

Speaking of Orbx, as far as I understood from the interview, I had the feeling the non photogrammetry areas will be more or less in the quality and style of what Orbx did for X-Plane 11 lately and if this is the case then the simulator will have (with or without photogrammetry) a rich wonderful virtual world to explore.

Agreed, I think the worst areas will look just like the True Earth series (give or take, as Orbx adds a lot of landmarks and POIs, but Orbx doesn’t all the data or the Azure AI available as Microsoft has). Having in mind the True Earth series are today the best sceneries we have so far in the current sims, I think the default scenery of MSFS2020 will be already good enought. We won’t need Global products nor regional sceneries, but airports and handmade and their surrounds (landmarks, POIs and better imagery corrected by hand when needed) would be really welcome.