Video: Map makeover

Google Earth may put conventional maps to shame, but its satellite and aerial imagery shows the world as it used to be, rather than as it is.

A new project taps a huge database of ever-updated webcams streaming views from every part of the world to keep the virtual world more up-to-date.

Austin Abrams, a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has developed a method to replace the usually static “skin” of virtual buildings and other features with images from the Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes (AMOS), a collection of live feeds from nearly 1000 webcams streaming from various sites around the world.

Automatically updated

Drawing on AMOS images, Abrams’s browser-based application, called Live3D, maps 2D webcam images onto a 3D model of a location or landmark. For example, at night it clothes the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, with the same light-studded darkened surface seen by the webcam.


Setting up Live3D to accept a particular camera feed is straightforward. Using the system’s web interface, the user outlines a region of the webcam image – the front of a building, for example – by moving the corners of a polygon. Another window shows the Google Earth view of the scene, complete with its own polygon, where they repeat the process – this time in 3D. The program then takes whatever appears in the outlined region of the 2D image and warps it to fit the 3D geometry.

After a user has mapped a few 2D regions from a webcam feed onto the 3D surface the software can work backwards from what it can see to deduce exactly where a camera is, making further region assignments easier.

Living scenes

“We wanted to make Google Earth and geospatial databases a little more alive,” says Abrams. With nearly 1000 webcam locations, and multiple points of interest in each video feed, Abrams is appealing for help from web users to flesh out the view. “Everything is handled through the web-based form, so even if it’s your first time using Google Earth, you should be able to use it,” he says.

You can take part in the project by calibrating one of the uncalibrated webcams at this page.

Kihwan Kim a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, not involved with Live3D, says that he is impressed with the project’s use of the AMOS dataset.

Unexposed corners

Late last year, Kim developed a way to augment a virtual Atlanta, Georgia, with 3D people and cars drawn to reflect streaming video of an area. Although using webcams doesn’t provide full-motion video, Live3D is easier for the public to use than other projects, he told New Scientist.

Although the size of the AMOS database allows large areas to be updated “live”, Abrams and Kim agree that a richly detailed real-time virtual world is still years away. “You’d be surprised at how many places on the Earth are not monitored by webcams,” says Abrams.