Posted by ChrisArchitect 11/3/2025
True. If you bring the viewpoint down to near street level and look horizontally, it's worse than traditional photogrammetry methods.
I've been looking for algorithms like this for representing distant regions in virtual worlds. Open Drone Map can do a good job, sometimes, but it really needs a cleanup pass.
I wouldn't knock the research. The results look impressive to me.
GIS won't want generative hallucinations.
Consumer mapping apps, social applications, and games (eg. flight sims) will want the maps to look as good as possible.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/flight-box...
I knew their name because, when I worked for an Airbus subsidiary, we talked with them about a solution to generate 3D environments for any/every airport.
They had some cool stuff but also some wonky stuff at the time (like highway overpasses actually being rendered as walls across the highway).
And also, was it any different for MSFS 2020?
These sort of projects always look cool but I think the real "wow factor" would be a file upload where you can see the result on your image. I assume there are reasons why this isn't done.
This is where we were heading with our 3D volumetric video company https://ayvri.com
We were working on blending 3D satellite imagery with your ground view (or low flying in the case of paragliders) photos and videos to create a 3D scene.
Our technology was acquired prior to us being able to fully realize the vision (and we moved on to another project).
I suspect hybrid solutions will remove the limitations of GS, with (eventually...) some smooth hand off. Do clean-enough GS like this; then hand the output to other systems which covert into forms more useful for your application and which adopt e.g. textures from localized photos etc.
It's just a bit of engineering and compute...