Some believe that this alternate technology could actually be used by Google

Jul 25, 2008 11:20 GMT  ·  By

The team from Google Earth is not sparing any effort when it comes to making the application as realistic as possible. Street view, 3D buildings and other features the team has recently come up with are some of the things that contribute to the popularity of Google Earth. The only thing that is missing to achieve a realistic image of the world is the possibility of seeing dynamic 3D videos from different locations.

The need for this is underscored by Frank Taylor, a former NASA employee that started Google Earth's unofficial blog, where, besides news on the latest improvements, he also offers an objective point of view on the development of the project, which can also be of use to the initiatives of the Google team.

What they could use the most, as Taylor suggests, would be an application created by a team of computer science and electrical engineering professors at the University of Southern California. Under the Sentinel Ave label, the professors created a 3D world, very much alike Google Earth, the only difference being that it offers dynamic scenes, in the form of multiple videos played at the same time.

These videos offer incredibly accurate details of buildings, interiors, and even people. Video Fusion, the patented technology the team of researchers came up with, allows integration of hundreds of pictures caught by surveillance cameras in one single video, in a tridimensional perspective. The blogger believes that this sort of application would integrate perfectly with Google Earth's technologies, to offer users a greater ability to see what the world is really like.

The drawback comes from the fact that people's privacy could now be more threatened than ever. In fact, Sentinel Ave's program was specially built to help commercial and military establishments better surveil their properties. Since Google was already criticized about its Google Earth initiative that was taken too far (or, actually, too close to people's faces), the adoption of this sort of application may prove to be too risky.