Couple of articles which may be interesting reading (in Chinese) --- touching on China-specific privacy, legal/data licensing issues, etc. surrounding these maps:
They had problems with providing a mapping service in China without a license though. They were forced to shutdown for a very long time + redesigned their website to survive. Make sure you get the right license first in China!
I wonder how frequently this will be updated. I notice several skyscrapers built over the past few months that aren't displayed yet (they only show the construction huts). So it's at least several months out of date.
This clearly has the most detail for zooming and browsing that I've seen, but for my day-to-day use I'll still be using map.sogou.com, which already has pretty good building and landmark decomposition, but has the best path-finder / location search of everyone in the market by far. I just made several queries on bj.o.cn that fell flat. For really hard-to-find places, I suspect I'll do my searching on sogou first, then pull up the closest landmark on o.cn and scroll over to where I want to be for a good visual description of where I'm going.
I've mentioned this before, but entering the "Chinese" internet (or internet of any foreign culture for that matter) is like entering a whole new world. It's amazing how the cultural aspects impacts small things like design sense and advertising colors.
The buildings are meticulously 3-D modeled and texture mapped--you can see the texture repetition artifacts. I've read some research about automatic modeling techniques from street view images+, but I'd suspect this was done by hand.
Is it fully 3D rendered? or just an isometric view like the old simcity? You can't rotate the viewpoint, as far as I've seen (but as I don't know Chinese I might be wrong).
Seriously by hand? How many mechanical turks?
Why do you say so? The textures and all seem to suggest otherwise. I am very much interested in the actual technology. Perhaps the textures were superimposed on the 3d models and not a direct input of the 3d modelling.
The research done by your fellow in MIT while in HKUST is also very impressive. Just that the result is not the same kind found in here - the one here is simply artistic model, not a realistic one.
You'll probably be waiting longer than that. One of the reasons China opted for the hand drawn approach is it lets them control what is and (more importantly) isn't shown.
I enjoy a good sinophobic innuendo as much as the next guy, but how is it any easier to omit something from a hand-drawn map than to blur it out in a satellite photo?
It's hard to explore o.cn in detail because everything is in Chinese, but whatever they have is quite impressive. Not only is the 3D view really well rendered (i.e. easy on the eyes), they have incredible attention to detail, down to using billboards as ad space.
How can an image be "pixel perfect" if the original is not made of pixels? I can understand pixel-perfect image scaling or the like, but a pixel-perfect map of the real world is impossible.
Not very. Most photos are taken from some angle (it's easier to reorient a satellite than to reposition its orbit). Course, you get the most quality when shooting close to straight down.
There's another company eDushi created this kind of map in 2007 or earlier. The company is in Hangzhou. They cover more cities than o.cn. I've checked the details of architecture. Quite accurate. And there is a lot daily life related information hidden in the map.
I checked how they did that. Basically they provide a easy way to let a user(Small buses owner) to add info. In other words it's a kind of "social mapping".Probably with some control.
The technical/theoretical side of it, the how do you scale up the (automatic) creation of those Sim-Cities ... yes, VERY fascinating and interesting.
The other side of the medal: those maps are creating a cute, sleek, clean and well-behaved view on the areas of high(est) population density ... they are I think heavily distorting the perception of the reality in those areas. I consider them a very strange way to do propaganda.
The reality is hidden by this means, which is the opposite of what maps/sat maps should be providing...
"Pixel Perfect" nails it quite good.
They are unrealistically perfect.
Constructed down to every pixel presented.
Event the most horrible sweatshops look cute in this renderings.
If this had/has an API it would make for a great game-board for MMOG's/on-line-&-offline-games or even strategy-games. Imagine adding textures for units and/or craters (though I'd guess this latter would be banned pretty soon).
I assume they're doing this because of some government restriction on photographing the city? Otherwise, I can't imagine that this kind of effort could be profitable...
there's no restriction, most of google earth works. personally i feel that these sim city maps are easier to view compared to live ariel photos.
i went to edushi to discuss a business opportunity, they were telling me how these were updated, i heard it's weekly. they also have a program with a school that teaches 3d studio max so they have a pipeline of people to help render these sim city like maps.
It's Chinese, which is a three-dimensional map of GuangZhou city, the labels are the names of places.
and as rywang mentioned above, there is a 3d map http://sh.o.cn/ for ShangHai too
Sorry. I did understand what was being shown, even though I couldn't read the language. I was just making a joke about how the map looked like a SimCity game.
Actually, I was making two jokes, the second being how the map was out of date the instance it was published, because of how quickly a city's buildings and streets can change in China.
There's quite a lot of map companies offering similar "SimCity-style" maps:
Edushi (http://edushi.com/), as others have mentioned --- IIRC they were one of the first to market
Baidu rolled out their own offering in 2010 (go to http://maps.baidu.com/, pick a city from the menu on the right, and then click the "三维" button)
City8 (http://city8.com/) don't have 3D maps, but they have a Streetview equivalent which they've been working on since 2008 in Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities: http://en.city8.com/search/search.aspx
Couple of articles which may be interesting reading (in Chinese) --- touching on China-specific privacy, legal/data licensing issues, etc. surrounding these maps:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/internet/2008-03/14/content_778745...
http://finance.jrj.com.cn/2010/09/0315448095546.shtml
This is neat. For example:
Shanghai skyscrapers: http://j.map.baidu.com/-FNB Beijing Olympic stadium: http://j.map.baidu.com/TjNB
Edit: for some reason, the links don't work in Chrome. Firefox works though.
The Baidu maps are powered by o.cn--you can see "o.cn" in the watermark.
Or for example chachaba.com (in Shenzhen):
http://sz.chachaba.com/location.action?placeId=221a75f1-bcfc...
They had problems with providing a mapping service in China without a license though. They were forced to shutdown for a very long time + redesigned their website to survive. Make sure you get the right license first in China!
For "Ultima-style" city maps, check out 8-Bit Cities:
http://8bitcity.com/
A couple of notes from a resident of Beijing:
I wonder how frequently this will be updated. I notice several skyscrapers built over the past few months that aren't displayed yet (they only show the construction huts). So it's at least several months out of date.
This clearly has the most detail for zooming and browsing that I've seen, but for my day-to-day use I'll still be using map.sogou.com, which already has pretty good building and landmark decomposition, but has the best path-finder / location search of everyone in the market by far. I just made several queries on bj.o.cn that fell flat. For really hard-to-find places, I suspect I'll do my searching on sogou first, then pull up the closest landmark on o.cn and scroll over to where I want to be for a good visual description of where I'm going.
"I notice several skyscrapers built over the past few months that aren't displayed yet"
that's a crazy pace !, compared to seeing the same unmistakable window view at San Jose/ SF every single year.
o.cn doesn't seem to have very good coverage of Beijing. It looks like everything outside of the 3rd ring is missing.
I've mentioned this before, but entering the "Chinese" internet (or internet of any foreign culture for that matter) is like entering a whole new world. It's amazing how the cultural aspects impacts small things like design sense and advertising colors.
This is mind-blowing. How was this created? The detail is incredible: http://i.imgur.com/gmsu4.png
The buildings are meticulously 3-D modeled and texture mapped--you can see the texture repetition artifacts. I've read some research about automatic modeling techniques from street view images+, but I'd suspect this was done by hand.
+ http://web.mit.edu/jxiao/Public/publication/2009/TOG/paper_h...
Looks like China's cheap labor is bridging the gap to AI.
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Is it fully 3D rendered? or just an isometric view like the old simcity? You can't rotate the viewpoint, as far as I've seen (but as I don't know Chinese I might be wrong).
Seriously by hand? How many mechanical turks? Why do you say so? The textures and all seem to suggest otherwise. I am very much interested in the actual technology. Perhaps the textures were superimposed on the 3d models and not a direct input of the 3d modelling.
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The research done by your fellow in MIT while in HKUST is also very impressive. Just that the result is not the same kind found in here - the one here is simply artistic model, not a realistic one.
This map only covers Guangzhou, actually. But I look forward to full coverage of China in a few hundred years!
You'll probably be waiting longer than that. One of the reasons China opted for the hand drawn approach is it lets them control what is and (more importantly) isn't shown.
I enjoy a good sinophobic innuendo as much as the next guy, but how is it any easier to omit something from a hand-drawn map than to blur it out in a satellite photo?
http://www.itsecurity.com/features/51-things-not-on-google-m...
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And the Chinese government does not want the rest of China to be shown, because?
You understand that those areas (and most of China) is already covered by Google Maps satellite view, right? Right?
nah, there is a city switcher in the top left.
And here's the one from Shanghai: http://sh.o.cn/
I asked this on Quora a while back: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Chachaba-create-their-3D-virtu...
It's hard to explore o.cn in detail because everything is in Chinese, but whatever they have is quite impressive. Not only is the 3D view really well rendered (i.e. easy on the eyes), they have incredible attention to detail, down to using billboards as ad space.
Reminds me so much of SimCity, only you can't raise taxes.
How can an image be "pixel perfect" if the original is not made of pixels? I can understand pixel-perfect image scaling or the like, but a pixel-perfect map of the real world is impossible.
This is amazing. I wonder how they do this? Surely it has to be automated somehow, I just can't imagine anyone building this by hand, even in China.
I've seen similar maps from 100+ years ago of my hometown in the UK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birmingham_in_1886.jpg
And of London:
http://www.garwood-voigt.com/catalogues/H242051LondonBrewer....
It's amazing how our idea of what is unachievable by hand has been skewed by computer graphics!
Not only can they build rendered cities at breakneck pace, they can do it for the real thing:
http://www.businessinsider.com/shanghai-1990-vs-2010-2010-6
Actually that's in fact possible. The models must be done by hand for landmarks, the rest may be repetitively. Similar efforts has been done by OSS games (http://wiki.openttd.org/City_Buildings_%28New_Graphics%29)
Obviously this is not what was done here, but how difficult is it to take a satellite photo from the side, instead of from directly above?
Not very. Most photos are taken from some angle (it's easier to reorient a satellite than to reposition its orbit). Course, you get the most quality when shooting close to straight down.
Wow... just... wow. The obvious question is... how was this done? Mechanical Turk?
No, silly: Mechanical Chinaman!
There's another company eDushi created this kind of map in 2007 or earlier. The company is in Hangzhou. They cover more cities than o.cn. I've checked the details of architecture. Quite accurate. And there is a lot daily life related information hidden in the map.
Here's the map of Hangzhou. http://hangzhou.edushi.com/
this is also very impressive. I like how they add small buses and signs to indicate bus stops. We can also see the name of big shopping centers
I checked how they did that. Basically they provide a easy way to let a user(Small buses owner) to add info. In other words it's a kind of "social mapping".Probably with some control.
I found an English version of the company behind Edushi: http://www.aladdincn.com/en/index.html
The technical/theoretical side of it, the how do you scale up the (automatic) creation of those Sim-Cities ... yes, VERY fascinating and interesting.
The other side of the medal: those maps are creating a cute, sleek, clean and well-behaved view on the areas of high(est) population density ... they are I think heavily distorting the perception of the reality in those areas. I consider them a very strange way to do propaganda.
The reality is hidden by this means, which is the opposite of what maps/sat maps should be providing...
"Pixel Perfect" nails it quite good. They are unrealistically perfect. Constructed down to every pixel presented.
Event the most horrible sweatshops look cute in this renderings.
If this had/has an API it would make for a great game-board for MMOG's/on-line-&-offline-games or even strategy-games. Imagine adding textures for units and/or craters (though I'd guess this latter would be banned pretty soon).
I assume they're doing this because of some government restriction on photographing the city? Otherwise, I can't imagine that this kind of effort could be profitable...
Meaning "pixel-art-style map of part of one city in China with many copy/pasted buildings."
You can change cities by clicking on "切换城市". Of course it's still not the whole country but it's still more than one city.
Baidu has something similar as well: http://j.map.baidu.com/hg2l
Are they doing this to get around some restrictions on showing real images?
there's no restriction, most of google earth works. personally i feel that these sim city maps are easier to view compared to live ariel photos.
i went to edushi to discuss a business opportunity, they were telling me how these were updated, i heard it's weekly. they also have a program with a school that teaches 3d studio max so they have a pipeline of people to help render these sim city like maps.
Baidu is using the o.cn images itself as explained by the watermarks.
And... it was out of date the minute it went live...
Can't read the language. What is this? The SimCity version of China?
It's Chinese, which is a three-dimensional map of GuangZhou city, the labels are the names of places. and as rywang mentioned above, there is a 3d map http://sh.o.cn/ for ShangHai too
Sorry. I did understand what was being shown, even though I couldn't read the language. I was just making a joke about how the map looked like a SimCity game.
Actually, I was making two jokes, the second being how the map was out of date the instance it was published, because of how quickly a city's buildings and streets can change in China.
Still, it is very nicely done!
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I wonder if the whole city is a vector....
Damn. Now I want to live in one of those cities... they're so cuteee!
Where are the 1.3 billion people?