Comment by bastawhiz
9 years ago
> This is the never-before-told story of the world’s most comprehensive mapping endeavour
Is it? Arguably, the mapping efforts of Google and others have reached further and collected more and more accurate data (street view, lidar, etc.).
It's probably the most comprehensive in terms of personnel and man-hours; those other mapping efforts are highly automated, but the descriptions of these maps imply a lot of people on the ground making them so detailed, since for a lot of the map details I don't see how you could reasonably get them from looking at a satellite map or a few public records. (Or perhaps they simply mean most comprehensive as in up to that point in time, which is a legitimate amount of hyperbole such an endeavour.)
As astonishingly accurate as Google's maps are, they lack a lot of resolution and data for under-developed regions like Oceania and Central Asia. The quality of the Soviet mapping projects were such that they're still competitive with a lot of the commercial offerings today for the more remote regions of the planet.
Check Amap, they have coloured 3d maps of all global cities with photo textures.
http://www.navibiz.com.cn/e/NewsFocus/nf-123-02.html
Interesting.
For what it's worth: Google Earth (and Google Maps) have 3d buildings and vegetation etc now, too.
(But I wonder whether it's based on new data, or they just use machine learning to guess the 3d shapes from the 2d data they already had.)
in case of autonavi, their 3d maps are human modeled and textured just like a giant 3d game