Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth • Hacker News Board

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#61

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 27, 2013, 6:43 PM UTC

throwawaay wrote: post #56

andrewljohnson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you say it, you're totally right about the vector maps thing. I don't think it's impossible cloudless aerials were inspired by MapBox though... I think you and your sibling overestimate how hard it is to chop up and process imagery with a cluster of computers.

The new base map imagery was preceded by the Timelapse release last month, which used basically the same techniques on historical data. See: " rel="nofollow">http://world.time.com/timelapse/> and " rel="nofollow">http://earthengine.google.org/> . It ought to be pretty clear that both of these have been in the works for a long time. If you seriously believe that _any_ mapping provider (including Microsoft, Nokia, or G…

[deleted]

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#62

Post by mayanksinghal » Thu, Jun 27, 2013, 6:52 PM UTC

stevehawk wrote: post #58

mayanksinghal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MapBox announcement seems to be not more than a couple of months old. If you think that someone can take inspiration, get data, process, QA test and launch such a feature in such a short duration, you should be impressed anyway. Google Earth had 3D for a long time. Vector maps is again a huge undertaking and takes time to get right. Some companies didn't take their time, some did.

But they didn't make Google Earth. They bought it from a small company that was partially funded by the CIA.

So was the case with Apple, if my sibling is correct. I am just trying to say is that there is plenty, like a lot lot, of innovation in Google Maps - from devices that make it's own mapping data to using WebGL to render it in 3D in browser. To claim otherwise, with incredibly weak argument as in the original comments, is either lazy or dishonest.

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#63

Post by chr1 » Thu, Jun 27, 2013, 8:42 PM UTC

chr1 wrote: post #15

hugi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hometown still looks horrible :'( https://maps.google.com/?ll=65.14846,-13.690295&spn=0.015042...

:(, but there are places with worse imagery https://maps.google.com/?ll=65.14846,-13.690295&spn=0.015042...

crap, copied a wrong link, i meant this https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Dilijan,+Tavush,+Armenia&hl=e...

Re: Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

#64

Post by andrewljohnson » Fri, Jun 28, 2013, 1:45 AM UTC

throwawaay wrote: post #56

andrewljohnson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you say it, you're totally right about the vector maps thing. I don't think it's impossible cloudless aerials were inspired by MapBox though... I think you and your sibling overestimate how hard it is to chop up and process imagery with a cluster of computers.

The new base map imagery was preceded by the Timelapse release last month, which used basically the same techniques on historical data. See: " rel="nofollow">http://world.time.com/timelapse/> and " rel="nofollow">http://earthengine.google.org/> . It ought to be pretty clear that both of these have been in the works for a long time. If you seriously believe that _any_ mapping provider (including Microsoft, Nokia, or G…

Well, I can definitely understand why you would make your remarks anonymously. I still don't think I'm uninformed to suggest this is not a coincidence, despite you berating me.

I was chatting with my colleague at work today, who actually stood up our landsat servers and does all of our tiling work, and he thinks that the pixel-averaging technique to de-cloud the images was an innovation that was pretty unique to MapBox. According to this article, they noticed a guy doing it in February 2013, and hired him right away to do it for them: http://www.wired.com/design/2013/05/a-cloudless-atlas/.

MapBox got to market with it in just a few months, and it's a particularly absurd argument to say this was too hard for Google's hundreds of maps engineers to implement. I heard at the State of the Map conference that it was just a few guys working on it at MapBox. Given Google already has the imagery, and the processing pipeline, I think adopting this declouding technique was actually a piece of cake.

Also, while Google has been removing clouds from their images for a long time, I think their technique has been to pick the best of many images. Their imagery used to have many more clouds in it, until all of a sudden.