Navteq bought PixelActive a couple of days ago. PixelActive is a company specialized in building 3D maps of roads, highways and cities. Founded by a team of veteran graphics experts, Pixel Active has been known to work for giants like Lockheed Martin or Nintendo. You might have seen a demo of PixelActive’s Cityscape in the past, but if you haven’t, check the demo below. it shows a “city builder” tool that allows the rapid construction of a city, with roads, bridges, city blocks and all.
While this is great to build something like Grand Theft Auto, using it for GPS navigation is another story: to be useful, things have to look like what you see when you’re looking around (at least to the point where you can tell where you are). And that’s really hard because PixelActive can’t use generic building designs now. It will be interesting to see how they solve that problem that pretty everyone else is bumping into. We have the technology to display the whole world in 3D — the question is “who wants to provide an somewhat accurate polygonal model and textures for a whole city, let alone the world?” – nobody has cracked this yet. Let’s wait and see if your next GPS will display something like this. Video in the full post.
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