The process would still be somewhat labor-intensive, since someone would have to apply significance to the landmarks.
GTA, specifically, doesn't use all the landmarks they find - they instead use rough facsimiles that give the same impression. It's really rather brilliant - a different design, but somehow it's familiar if you've been there or seen that.
Ultimately, for video games, they are still designed by hand, because of the "if it's not there, it doesn't exist" problem and for a host of other reasons. Unfortunately, for space reasons, most of it is non-interactive in a meaningful way.
There's some interesting work being done by ESRI that could hopefully lead to virtual city designs that are almost fully interactive. Imagine GTA where every building could be entered and every object could be interacted with because they are generated on the fly.
Sort of a realistic Minecraft. Very sort of, but still.
I would argue the "significant landmark" problem has essentially been solved as a side effect of online photo sharing sites (originally Flickr, now everything) -- the most frequently photographed things are the landmarks, and the number of photos scales with the significance of the landmark. When you search for "Rome" on Flickr, the clusters of photos that pop out as being 3D-reconstructable are precisely the landmarks.
Quoting:
"The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags "Rome" or "Roma". Matching and reconstruction took a total of 21 hours on a cluster with 496 compute cores. Upon matching, the images organized themselves into a number of groups corresponding to the major landmarks in the city of Rome. Amongst these clusters can be found the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon."
GTA, specifically, doesn't use all the landmarks they find - they instead use rough facsimiles that give the same impression. It's really rather brilliant - a different design, but somehow it's familiar if you've been there or seen that.
Ultimately, for video games, they are still designed by hand, because of the "if it's not there, it doesn't exist" problem and for a host of other reasons. Unfortunately, for space reasons, most of it is non-interactive in a meaningful way.
There's some interesting work being done by ESRI that could hopefully lead to virtual city designs that are almost fully interactive. Imagine GTA where every building could be entered and every object could be interacted with because they are generated on the fly.
Sort of a realistic Minecraft. Very sort of, but still.