Pretty: But..... Whats It For?

[HiFlyer 9,358]

So we've all been drooling over the beautiful photogrammetry of MSFS for the last few months.

Done well, this PG can create a flying environment of unparalleled visual accuracy and realism. Microsoft is obviously super heavily invested in PG technology, as well as spending untold but seemingly enormous amounts of money on MSFS, Azure, and a huge new internet backbone.

The purpose of Azure seems fairly clear, and 2D mapping for various location services, like Bing maps, is understandable.

But (accepting the high risk of seeming dense) I find that besides for being thrilling the eye, and cool to swoop over in vr, I'm not quite sure what commercial purposes exist for photogrammetry cities.

Obviously MS is not going to all the enormous expense in money time and effort to create these things just for simming, but I remain unsure of practical applications that would not be served just as well by 2D maps or Goggle type street-views via regular photography.

Anyone able to clear that up for me?

[hs118 707]

Based on Asobo previous work with VR travel exploration and the current "world model" they are trying to create with MSFS, my bet is Microsoft is building a platform and SDK for any application to use. 

MS has always done their best work in creating extensible platforms. 

PS I'm crossing my fingers that Asobo gets VR "as real as it gets" for all this, and gets us out of the half baked, virtual kludge we currently "enjoy" in flightsim.

 

Edited May 20, 2020 by yurei

[goates 576]

53 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

But (accepting the high risk of seeming dense) I find that besides for being thrilling the eye, and cool to swoop over in vr, I'm not quite sure what commercial purposes exist for photogrammetry cities.

Virtual tourism, TV and movie productions, commercial sims, and open world gaming are some possible uses. For games, one could replace the photogrammetry data of our world and replace with some sci-fi or fantasy world to avoid having to take up a couple terabytes of users' hard drives. Take No Man's Sky or Eve and add in some very detailed worlds to explore, for example.

Edited May 20, 2020 by goates

[mp15 138]

 

The Bing maps are just that, a map, besides the fact that nobody use it, It Is useful for the user to verify an address, a direction, a distance, a gas station near by so forth and so on while on the 3D world map a whole new portal of possibilities comes up, if you combine a low latency internet, a powerful lighting engine, lat lon and building visuals through computer vision plus the internet of things, all sort of specific apps can be build on top not only a Flight simulator.

Dynamic Smart cities, drone delivery, VR drone sightseeing, remote driving cars, real time dynamic autonomous tracking, traffic clustering, real estate, so forth and so on.

 

[goates 576]

From Microsoft's point of view, this could be leading back down the road they started on with ESP. While there have been 3D models built of the world for many different industries, such as the ones listed above, most are somewhat customized and/or proprietary, and expensive. With this new technology, they could be looking to commoditize it and bring the cost way down. Anyone, anywhere that needs an accurate 3D model of the world wouldn't have to build their own, they would just sign up for Azure Earth (or whatever they call it).

There are lots of other use cases around planning and training outside of aviation too. City modelling and disaster planning, and emergency response training would be two more examples.

Edited May 20, 2020 by goates

[rtodepart 761]

3 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

 I'm not quite sure what commercial purposes exist for photogrammetry cities.

 

I worked for a company where we worked on  3D live tracking for potential future law enforcement and the like software ( my NDA expired long ago so im free to talk about what i worked on) . but anyways we used to work with photogrammetry alot  and that company was blowing close to a billion a year for high accuracy data . we pretty much will deploy a small group of testers (people) in a few US city's where we had really accurate DATA of that city with full access to their mobil phone and smart watches including video data and we could pretty much recreate a live 3D recording on a 24 hour loop in case anything  happened the day before we pretty much had access to everything and any giving part of the city with a 3d Live picture . in case you wonder why we needed smart phone access and watches we used to obtain the exact location and with smart watch data we could see speed and heart beat to determine if individuals closed to a robery or any incident were scared at the time of the incident at hand this helps recreate a more accurate scenario  ... so yes theres a market for this photogrammetry data . 

[tweekz 2,165]

7 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

but I remain unsure of practical applications that would not be served just as well by 2D maps or Goggle type street-views via regular photography.

Some interesting applications it could be used for have been mentioned - so it's kind of an investment for the future.

But it can be even more simple. Think of a restaurant. They are selling food. Still, if it is decorated with nice interior, you will prefer going eating there over a dirty location (if the quality of the food is comparable). In other words: to make it more attractive.

Edited May 20, 2020 by tweekz

[nickhod 425]

8 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

I'm not quite sure what commercial purposes exist for photogrammetry cities.

At this point ... technology speculation and creating barriers to entry mostly. Google spots a new technology and has to decide whether to pump cash into it, wait and just acquire startups later, or sit it out. Google decided to pump many millions into photogrammetry to erect a big barrier to entry to plucky startups in the 3D mapping space.

Microsoft, seeing what Google does, tends to do the same but on a small scale, to show the world that "oh yeah, we can do that too". Hence, we have an MS street view, but with poor coverage, and MS photogrammetry, but with poor coverage outside of US cities.

To understand the point of this, it worth looking at how satellite and aerial imagery has been licensed by Google and MS. The big players in this space, Digital Globe, ImageSat etc charge G & MS 10s of millions of dollars a year to license their imagery. I'd guess that Google didn't want a repeat of this with photogrammetry and instead wanted to own the assets end-to-end. No risk of them being licensed to a competitor.

The eventual use cases are probably line-of-business AR and simulations:

• Imagine that a police officer with AR glasses can "zoom out" from the location they are physically, look around a building they're about to enter, check for exit points and paths
• Imagine a company creating a transport simulation for a city can do so with a completely accurate model of the city
• Imagine a mobile company can figure out where to erect 5G masts by creating a simulation of attenuation from buildings or land features.

Back to flight sims, what I'd really love to see is if anyone manages to shoehorn Google photogrammetry in a flight sim. The model structure has been reverse engineered, it's technically possible.

[tpete61 227]

22 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

So we've all been drooling over the beautiful photogrammetry of MSFS for the last few months.

Done well, this PG can create a flying environment of unparalleled visual accuracy and realism. Microsoft is obviously super heavily invested in PG technology, as well as spending untold but seemingly enormous amounts of money on MSFS, Azure, and a huge new internet backbone.

The purpose of Azure seems fairly clear, and 2D mapping for various location services, like Bing maps, is understandable.

But (accepting the high risk of seeming dense) I find that besides for being thrilling the eye, and cool to swoop over in vr, I'm not quite sure what commercial purposes exist for photogrammetry cities.

Obviously MS is not going to all the enormous expense in money time and effort to create these things just for simming, but I remain unsure of practical applications that would not be served just as well by 2D maps or Goggle type street-views via regular photography.

Anyone able to clear that up for me?

Your probably over analyzing this. Bing was around long before the game. 
if bing has other usefulness it may have no relation to this game at all.

[scotchegg 4,186]

I can imagine it being used in tandem with other data for all sorts of purposes. E.g. a real estate developer who wants to understand everything about an area (height of surrounding buildings, footfall, lighting in different weather conditions, pedestrian experience etc.), put them in a VR headset with avatars showing car / human traffic gained from phone data and current weather conditions and you can probably get reasonably near a real-life experience of being there.

[eslader 1,783]

What practical reason is there for ever improving visuals? Why couldn't The Witcher 3 have been a text adventure? 😉

 

People want nice graphics. They'll pay for them. Thats' all the practicality needed.

 

 

[HiFlyer 9,358]

2 minutes ago, eslader said:

What practical reason is there for ever improving visuals? Why couldn't The Witcher 3 have been a text adventure? 😉

 

People want nice graphics. They'll pay for them. Thats' all the practicality needed.

 

 

Think you missed the point if the question...

[HiFlyer 9,358]

9 hours ago, scotchegg said:

I can imagine it being used in tandem with other data for all sorts of purposes. E.g. a real estate developer who wants to understand everything about an area (height of surrounding buildings, footfall, lighting in different weather conditions, pedestrian experience etc.), put them in a VR headset with avatars showing car / human traffic gained from phone data and current weather conditions and you can probably get reasonably near a real-life experience of being there.

I actually did consider stuff like that, at least partially. Where it kind of fell apart for me was imagining the gigantic expenditure in equipment in manpower to do the entire earth in PG, vs the potential financial return, of the most obvious possible applications.

I'm not sure it added up, for me.

[eslader 1,783]

I think you missed the point of the answer. No, it's not just for flight sims. Any game that needs to have a realistic real-world city can get a jump on its graphics by using this technology. The real advance here is in the AI image doctoring. The cities would look like junk if they just left them as they look in the sat pics. They're using AI to edit those pics to make the cities look realistic. Now apply that to other games. Have your Assassin's Creed visual artists sketch out a city and then let AI fill in the details. Much cheaper and easier to generate giant but detailed maps if you don't have to have a human going over every square inch.

 

The real answer is exactly what I said. People will pay for nice graphics. If you have the nicest graphics production capability around, or the most cost-effective one, people will pay for your nice graphics and you will make money.

 

 

Edited May 21, 2020 by eslader

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

VFR people exist you know. Not everyone is flying commercial airliner.