[vvatermelone]

This is done at a satellite level nowadays rather than fixed-wing aircraft. Microsoft/Bing did this as well and ended up spinning off their aerial collection division for that same reason, not too long after this article was published.

There's just not a huge demand for higher quality imagery by the general public, and those industries who do need higher quality/georeferenced imagery are willing to pay for it.

[bradly]

The screensavers for Apple TV and very manual and really cool how they are made. Everything was planned. The location, exact time/day, sun placement and buildings for lens flares. One of my favorite talks at Apple was on the process to create the ones from space. An incredible amount of work went into pulling those off just for a screen saver.

[infecto]

Do you by chance have a link to that talk?

[bradly]

Unfortunately it was an internal only presentation. Really I had no idea you can basically rent the ISS and the crew in it. They all had to be trained on how to use the special camera system. If I remember correctly it was a custom made RED that has to be sent up in a payload. It was incredible.

[jeffbee]

Are you sure? There's a recent (2020) official Google blog where they state that they use satellite images as a fallback only for places that don't have "an established aerial survey market." It makes sense that aerial images would be more desirable.

[deelowe]

I thought the biggest issue with higher quality imagery had more to do with governments than interest (privacy legislation, national security, etc).

[reportingsjr]

Hmm, I'm curious about your first claim! I can't find anything more recent than ~2017[0], but they were still using Airplanes to gather imagery for the 3D maps. I'm pretty sure this is still the case, as urban area resolution is way higher than available non military satellite imagery.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suo_aUTUpps

[tinus_hn]

The maximum resolution of satellite imagery is about half a meter. That is not due to sensor limitations, it’s because a satellite has to watch through the atmospheric distortion.

Satellite images can’t compete with aerial photography, unless you are trying to photograph an area where you can’t fly, such as in military applications, because in that case there just is no aerial photography.

[djbebs]

That's not true. We know from trumps "leak" of a satellite photo showing an Iranian missile that there are satellites with resolutions at least as good as 7cm to 10cm

[tinus_hn]

It is not in fact known that that photo was taken by a satellite, it is only known that around that time a spy satellite was in the sky in the direction of where the photo was taken. But it could also have been taken by other means.

The image is supposedly taken at a pretty big angle, yet shows a pretty much crystal clear image with no atmospheric distortion at all, of a scene in the desert. I’m not convinced. If this were possible, what would be keeping companies from commercializing it?

Here’s an interesting source though for computationally sharpening the images for static scenes:

https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChanGroup/project_turbulence....