MODELING THE HUMAN HABITAT IN 3D FOR THE INTERNET

Franz Leberl
Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

Keynote presentation

Urban 3D Modeling – International Summer School
Szekesfehervar, Hungary, 27 August 2008

ABSTRACT

In March 2005, at the occasion of his 50th birthday, Bill Gates went public with his “Virtual Earth Vision” for local search in the Internet and stated:

"You'll be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the merchandise. Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough.”

This implies an enormous advance in computing power, communications bandwidth, miniaturization of computing, increase of storage capacity and in the ability to model the human habitat (the Earth) in great detail in 3 dimensions, with photographic realism and at very low cost per data unit. Action followed this declaration by Bill Gates, and the transition of a then-10-year old Microsoft business segment called “Map Point” into a new Virtual Earth Business Unit was kicked off.

The Microsoft initiative can serve as an example and actually also as a driver for the future of computing and of computational thinking. Research in the complete automatic creation of 3D models of urban spaces has become greatly inspired and now is a very active field of research. The level of automation in creating 3D city models has benefited from an increase in the redundancy of the source data in the form of highly overlapping imagery either from the air or from the street.

The talk will “evangelize” the current capabilities of the Virtual Earth system, point to some pieces of new science in the analysis of imagery of the human habitat, and of “Visual Computing”, and set the stage for an educated speculation about the future of computing.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

I received my degrees from Vienna University of Technology (Dipl.-Ing., 1967; Dr.techn., 1972). I worked in the Netherlands, California, Minnesota, Colorado and Austria. Today I am a chaired professor of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology.

As a business man, I formed Vexcel Corporation in Boulder (Colorado, 1985) and Vexcel Imaging GmbH (Austria, 1993, manufacturer of the UltraCam Digital Large Format Aerial Camera). As a research manager, I was CEO of the Austrian Research Centers (1996-1998) with 1000 employees.

My current outlook on life is defined by the sale of Vexcel Corp. and Vexcel Imaging GmbH to Microsoft Corp. (USA) in mid-2006, resulting in a position as a Director of Microsoft Virtual Earth. That ended in November 2007, so that I can now serve as Dean of Computer Science at Graz University of Technology (2008-2011).