Here’s an interesting story from the BBC. There’s a company creating a system that records a race-car track and allows players to virtually drive the track alongside real drivers. There seems to be several parts to this system:

First, they drive a car (like the google-maps car) over the racetrack. In addition to taking 360 degree images, they have a system to detect the distance to everything. Using that information they construct the geometry and images for the 3d world. (This is a whole lot easier and more accurate than constructing race-tracks in a 3d-modeling package.) The results look photorealistic, with every little puddle and asphalt crack included:

The second part is that they allow you play the game during actual races. I assume they do this by taking GPS information from the actual cars, and using it to create virtual cars in your game-world. Obviously, there’s a problem here in that the other cars cannot actually interact with the player.

I think the first part is the more interesting part. The idea of using a special camera system to construct a virtual world from real-world objects seems pretty interesting. I could imagine them using it to construct game worlds out of downtown areas of cities. The game-world would then be very realistic, with every bit of graffiti or cracked window included in the game. Game artists wouldn’t have to manually add those details. The downside to this approach is that I’m not quite sure how they’d deal with people or cars, which you’d want to edit-out. And the game-world might look too photorealistic. You don’t want your animated characters to look cartoonish and out-of-place because they’re walking around a photorealistic game-world.

Google Maps could be a whole lot more interesting if it was a 3d world, rather than a series of photographs every 30 feet.