NYU releases the largest LiDAR dataset ever to help urban development | Hacker News Reader

NYU releases the largest LiDAR dataset ever to help urban development

techcrunch.com

113 pointsjanober11 comments

I wonder whether there will be a sort of 3d model version of openstreetmap one day. Especially with drones, it would be relatively easy for individuals to start recording the world in 3d.

There are all sorts of cool parishes one could do with that (too bad Google didn't seem to have an API for their 3d map anymore).

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/F4_Map

take a look at the city of geelong, victoria, Australia - they collected lidar data and opened it up, so got imported.

Many users are doing the same. We are a long way from Google maps 3D coverage; but is all open data.

In Australia also have addresses datasets as open ("GNAF"), and many industries tie back to that to do variius levels of building information modeling (BIM).

Feels like in 10-20 years those movies where they pull up the blueprints to plan a heist will be a reality.

What applications? Like most Techcrunch articles seems incomplete, more like a press release summary.

I wonder how many games and movies we'll see set there?

None? At least for video games, for some reason producers don't seem to like to include real cities. They recreate architectural styles, put a lot of work into making the place feel like the real city, but if you pull out an actual map, it turns out the virtual buildings and streets don't exist.

I first realized that when I played Modern Warfare 3 around the same time I visited Prague. I pulled up the Prague level map and compared to the city map and my photos; lo and behold, it turns out the city plan in the game was completely made up, even though it features sorta-like real buildings.

Not sure why this is particularly exceptional. Very high resolution lidar has been commercially available for a while. And the EA in the UK has released approx 4 TB (compressed) under an open licence.

To be fair, at 300 points per square meter it's a lot higher res than the highest EA 25cm resolution data, with its very patchy coverage. But the EA's 1m data covers about half the country so you're right, this featured NYU data is a long way off being the "largest public LiDAR data set ever collected", unless I'm missing something.

If anyone's interested, here's something I made with the Environment Agency (and Natural Resources Wales) data:

https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map

Fantastically beautiful!

Had this strange feeling as I was roaming, zoomed in so I had no idea where I was, when suddenly I recognised a village - I've lived there!

Oh my God haha zoom zoom zoom that's awesome

Reminds me of those electron microscope photographs of fleas haha

I wonder if there are any privacy implications.

Not really given the existence of photography. I don't think the shape data would be that much ore revealing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com