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by samspenc 1225 days ago
IIRC KitBash [1] is the largest player in this space and has photo-realistic models of large environments including San Francisco. Are you planning to compete with them head-to-head in the same market?

[1] https://kitbash3d.com/
1 comments
elfprince13 1225 days ago
It looks like their core business model is modular asset packs, not necessarily tied to real world environments? Potentially some overlap, but I would guess it's unlikely we would be going head-to-head with them in most customer use cases.
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samstave 1225 days ago
Have you 3D printed any of the buildings in your data-set?

Specifically bridges, and would it be easy to extract just bridges from your set?

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elfprince13 1225 days ago
Yes, we generate water-tight meshes for buildings that are 3D printable (and terrain can be made 3D printable pretty easily). Bridges are one of the weak-points in our current reconstruction process - the gnarlier bits of 3D road network inference is implemented internally, but there's a bit more work to get make the output pretty enough to pass through to end-users.
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samstave 1224 days ago
I have an idea ;

When I traveled to Japan for work often, I got a puzzle set of all major land bodies that fit into a plastic-slotted-type map of the oceans, so a child woul learn the continents... (All three of my kids are really good at geography because of that puzzle I got.)

But it also had subsets of more complex and smaller-as-you-go pieces such that instead of just "Europe" it waould break down into the individual countries that made up 'europe, scandinavia, asia' etc...

would be cool to be able to print out "times square" 'Harlem' etc as individual sets... and construct a "manhatten island" place by place....

Also, Fun Fact, Golden Gate Park in SF is larger than Central Park in NYC.

Other Idea ; make each model with a QR code on it in relief/raise such that when you print it out, it points to the WIKI page of said famous building....

EDIT:

Oh and if you do this, and you use tiny url you can link the QR codes to the tiny and then be ab;e to use the geocodes for scanning to show you where in the worl the IP is scanning your links to understand the geo traffic from 'thing'

I did this on cannabis labels I designed for a company such that if they had a product scanned, linking them to lab results for cannabis products, it will show where the dispensaries were where customers were scanning / following them from...

it was pretty slick...

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elfprince13 1224 days ago
Very interesting idea, although one potential concern, depending on implementation, is that a lot of landmarks are copyrighted in a way s.t. you can include them in maps of a larger area, but you can't provide them standalone (or advertise using their names).
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samstave 1222 days ago
My personal philos ;

If I can see it. With thine owns eyes.

Then I am free to do with whatever I want with that which I can clearly see with mine own eyes.

Specifically if I am standing on 'public' property...

So if it requires me to traverse private ; its yours.

If I can see it from public ; its open source.

Fin.

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