Archinect - News

Now Google Maps can see inside buildings thanks to AI

2022-05-13T12:06:00-04:00

Google launched a new mode for Maps on Wednesday, designed to give users a more real-life look at the places they’re going before they even go. The new Immersive View is sort of a Street View in the sky: you can look over a location from above to get a sense of the neighborhood and then drop to street level to see the specific spots you might want to hit up.

The feature was revealed at Google’s I/O 2022 Keynote address in which CEO Sundar Pichai also introduced a new flood forecasting feature and expanded capabilities of the 15-year-old Maps project made possible through advancements in AI technology. Pichai says the company now has 1.6 billion buildings and over 60 million kilometers of road to date as part of the project.

The Immersive View feature will now allow the interiors of a good portion of them to be seen using a machine learning technique called neural rendering. Pichai used London's Westminster area as an example and said the feature is useful in providing pedestrian and vehicle congestion information to users in real-time.

Google Maps is integrating buildings and architectural details, far surpassing other map makers such as Apple & Bing

2017-12-21T16:51:00-05:00

Justin O'Beirne lays out years worth of research on mapping technologies in his essay Google Map's Moat. O'Beirne reveals,"Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps [...] The biggest difference is the building footprints: Google seems to have them all, while Apple doesn’t have any. [...] The buildings are a new thing, and I’ve been watching Google gradually add them over the past year."

With plenty of map screenshot GIFs, O'Beirne illustrates how Google has integrated architecture (including sheds, trailers, garages, etc.) with fairly accurate architectural detail just in the past year. Compared alongside Apple and other mapping technologies, Google is far ahead of the game.

Architectural detail on churches from Google maps, even the front steps are included. Photo: Justin O'Beirne.

Google is also using this data to create AOI's, Areas of Interest, on it's mapping service. Using it's building footprint data collected from satellites and the function of tho...

Help fund this Kickstarter for 3D printed maps of Tokyo

2016-10-11T13:39:00-04:00

The confluence of Google mapping, 3D printing and the desire for inventive home decor has produced a Kickstarter for One Hundred Tokyo, a fully-fledged three dimensional map of Tokyo that is divided into 100 handy pieces. Pick your favorite palm-sized square(s) or collect all 100; it's up to you and your available display space. Nonetheless, these minutely detailed urban segments are cool/notable both for their immediacy and their accuracy; Zenrin, the same urban data providers that work with Google Maps and Microsoft, have "specially equipped vehicles" that compile the metropolitan deets used to produce the models.

What else is going on with 3D printing? So glad you asked:

Photographer captures the landscapes of the Middle East's 'brutal building sites'

2015-06-17T13:37:00-04:00

When most people think of the Arabian peninsula, they think of the opulent man-made islands of Dubai and that city’s sparking, futuristic towers... But with his series Crossings, Arko Datto shifts the attention to the millions of migrant workers from throughout Asia who are building these structures. Datto used Google Maps and Google Earth to capture the vast highways, sprawling landscapes, and grand projects that laborers have built under conditions that border on slavery.

“The work deals with the issue in a fairly abstract/tangential way,” Datto told Wired Magazine. “The total lack of human presence in the images is symbolic of the anonymity, facelessness, and lack of representation that the migrant workers suffer.”

Apple Maps puts its own cars on the streets, in uphill battle against Google Maps

2015-06-10T13:47:00-04:00

So will Apple’s version of street-based imagery simply be a direct copy of Street View? Possibly not. A patent filed back in 2013 mentions “3D Position Tracking for Panoramic Imagery Navigation,” and the filing is disparaging of existing imaging software, calling it a “tedious experience,” though it doesn’t mention Google Street View by name.

For a limited time only, you can play PAC-MAN on Google Maps

2015-04-06T18:39:00-04:00

Welcome, Player 1! You can now play the classic arcade game PAC-MAN in Google Maps with streets as your maze. Avoid Blinky, Pinky, Inky, (and Clyde!) as you swerve the streets of some famous places around the world. But eat the pac-dots fast, because this game will only be around for a little while.

There are even Google Maps-specific bonus-point icons, along with the classic fruits. It's a highly addictive way to learn your way around an city's streets.

Wired looks at "Ground Truth", Google's initiative to improve Maps accuracy

2014-12-16T14:53:00-05:00

On a recent visit to Mountain View, I got a peek at how the Google Maps team assembles their maps and refines them with a combination of algorithms and meticulous manual labor—an effort they call Ground Truth. The project launched in 2008, but it was mostly kept under wraps until just a couple years ago. It continues to grow, now covering 51 countries, and algorithms are playing a bigger role in extracting information from satellite, aerial, and Street View imagery.

New Google Satellites Could Be Able to See Your Face from the Sky

2014-08-14T20:23:00-04:00

Two months ago, after much lobbying by the biggest satellite company in North America, DigitalGlobe, the US government relaxed restrictions to allow for commercially available satellite imagery up to 25 cm resolution—twice as detailed as the previous limit of 50 cm [...] The extra sharp images from Worldview-3 will greatly increase the maps' level of detail to the point where it can make out 10-inch objects, which means Google will soon be able to see “manholes and mailboxes” [...]

DigitalGlobe launched the first commercial satellite yesterday. Google, Microsoft, and several US government agencies are customers of DigitalGlobe. Such sharp images would be able to make out human faces, which, coupled with facial recognition software, could start to sound like a sci-fi dystopia. But it also would have interesting implications for both daily life and architecture, providing a startling degree of visibility across distances.

How We Picture a City: Venice and Google Maps

2014-03-03T15:41:00-05:00

In 2013, we picture cities a little differently, with demography and photography. Cities live in Instagram, in patterns of light from space, in blueprints and visualizations and—most like Canaletto’s civic landscapes—on Google Street View. Now, an artist in London has done some creative, comparative history, pairing Canaletto’s Venice and London with contemporary depictions, as glimpsed by the Google van.

Google Street View gets (even more) personal

2013-12-10T14:44:00-05:00

Google's Street View is slowly covering more and more of the world's surface, but it still has holes. Now though, you can help fill them—and all you need is an Android phone or DSLR. Google has just launched a new Street View feature which allows any user to recreate the usual Street View experience by stringing together photo spheres along paths which they define.

Google brings Street View inside more than 65 airports and train stations, calls it a 'first effort'

2013-11-26T13:16:00-05:00

Google today launched an interactive map featuring Street Views of over 65 mass-transit hubs. The map features some locations you may have already explored, like Emirates' A380 or London's Gatwick Airport, alongside some new sites across Europe, South America, and Asia.

Click here to view the interactive map.

Google Maps Gets 25 Million New Building Footprints

2012-10-22T18:28:00-04:00

The latest update brings 25 million new building footprints to Google Maps, making Google’s map offering even more detailed and comprehensive. The new building footprints have been created by a computer, which processed actual aerial imagery and rendered the shapes of buildings in the maps. Users can help out and fix inaccurate building footprints in Google Map Maker, as well as assign businesses to existing buildings or even draw the entire building footprints themselves.

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

2012-09-06T18:03:00-04:00

It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality seriously, we would have to believe that every physical space is, in his words, "interpenetrated" with information. All physical spaces already are also informational spaces.

Tilt-tables and Google Maps make a game out of environments

2012-04-28T17:17:00-04:00

How much have books or film influenced your sense and recognition of place were you've never been before? And how about games, as developers push for more accurate and realistic map models? How will the ability to interface with all aspects of real-world data affect our future perception of space and place?

Built using Google's Start Here technology.

Google to open campus in Frank Gehry's Binoculars

2011-11-03T18:40:50-04:00

Wojcicki said the new campus — three adjacent buildings including Frank Gehry-designed Binoculars Building — would also help Google attract candidates from area colleges and universities... The company's focus on Web search is evoked by the iconic binocular sculpture at the site, created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

9/11 Memorial Gets Google Mapped

2011-09-22T14:14:49-04:00

Google is committed to providing our users with the richest, most up-to-date maps possible. [...] In this case, the edit for the 9/11 memorial site was made by a map maker user on Sept 12, 2011.

That was fast.