The city of Helsinki[1] has been virtually mapped for AR/VR[2] applications for the first time.
The project is a partnership between the City of Helsinki and Umbra[3], a platform that optimizes large visual datasets for streaming over mobile, a challenge that's going to be increasingly vital with the anticipated rise of Augmented Reality applications.
The Helsinki model was created from aerial photographs that date from 2015. The resulting texture-mapped 3D mesh accounts for more than 30 square miles of the city.
Why go to the trouble of making a virtual map of a city when a satellite can easily snap photos?
It's a step toward what's called the AR Cloud[4], which is most easily understood as a digital copy of the real world.
Right now, GPS does a decent job of permitting mobile applications to pull up relevant information about the world (restaurant reviews, for example) based on general location. In the future, AR apps will access a digital overlay of the real world whenever you train a camera on a given landmark.
Pointing your device at a statue, for instance, may prompt an AR app to pull up relevant visual or textual information. Through AR, the visual world will become a giant repository of information, just as the internet is today.
But whoever controls the AR Cloud -- that virtual overlay -- will have an outsized influence over the information AR apps access. There's a push[5] right now to keep the AR Cloud open, which may be the only way to ensure it doesn't fall under the influence of profit-motivated companies.
Helsinki has decided to grab the bull by the horns and create