For years I've been dreaming of a driving/pedestrian sandbox game that used Google Maps data to let me drive recklessly around my home town with accurate models of the buildings and roads.
Me too. The problem seems to be mainly that the models are still awfully approximate and the textures are horribly blurry. They're fantastic for a bird's-eye view or flight simulators, but not what you want for driving.
I'm hoping that at some point in the next 10 years, Google/Microsoft come up with a high-res version produced mainly by Street View-type data or similar drone-supplied data. I suspect that basic photogrammetry is the easy part -- that the challenging part is dealing with changing sun position, hourly/daily/monthly weather/seasons, and all of the pedestrians and moving/parked vehicles.
Fun fact: Google street view cars record video-- the widely spaced street view nodes are a small fraction of the imagery they have stored. It should be pretty easy to do higher res photogrammetry with the raw data.
That's what I was thinking. The satellite photos are detailed enough to see lane lines, and combine that with the street level photos will get you the road configuration.
But I think whatever data GPS software uses is already detailed enough to know lane config, it tells you exactly what lane to be in when making turns.
I'm hoping that at some point in the next 10 years, Google/Microsoft come up with a high-res version produced mainly by Street View-type data or similar drone-supplied data. I suspect that basic photogrammetry is the easy part -- that the challenging part is dealing with changing sun position, hourly/daily/monthly weather/seasons, and all of the pedestrians and moving/parked vehicles.