The rapid speed at which technology is advancing seems to amaze me every single day and today is no exception. Below is a video demonstrating ongoing research being done out of the Georgia Institute of Technology funded in part by a Google Research Award. Be sure to watch the video at the bottom of this post. Below is some information from the research site.

Kihwan Kim, Sangmin Oh, Jeonggyu Lee and Irfan Essa,
College of Computing, School of Interactive Computing
GVU Center, Georgia Institute of Technology

* Paper to appear in ISMAR (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) 2009, Orlando Florida USA

** This work was in part funded by a Google Research Award (http://research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html).

Abstract

We introduce methods for augmenting aerial visualizations of Earth (from tools such as Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth) with dynamic information obtained from videos. Our goal is to make Augmented Earth Maps that visualize the live broadcast of dynamic sceneries within a city. We propose different approaches to analyze videos of pedestrians and cars, under differing conditions and then augment Aerial Earth Maps (AEMs) with live and dynamic information. We also analyze natural phenomenon (clouds) and project information from these to the AEMs to add the visual reality.

System Overview

Videos

(1) AVI/Divx 6.8, 80MB: Download

(2) Youtube (5:21) :