Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is a great technical success. It allows you to fly around the world, includes more than 37,000 airports and uses Bing Maps as your number one image resource.
Their images mark a new point of visual constancy for simulation software, landscapes derived from animated satellite photographs through weather rendering. However, the assignment may never have succeeded without HoloLens.
The initial inspiration for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was HoloLens HoloTour, which was a kind of technical demonstration for Microsoft’s real virtual headset. HoloTour has noticed iconic places like Rome and Machu Picchu recreated in 3D, with enough details to make the brain at least a little real.
A fitness platform will be the next street for this type of mapping in the world. Several corporations are already proposing the first steps in this direction.
If you create routes on genuine roads, Google Street View to see a slideshow of your adventure while running or biking. Zwift has recreated places such as London, Richmond in Virginia and Mont Ventoux in France in the form of stylized video games. Rouvy places cyclist avatars in “geo-synchronized” videos of popular routes.
The techniques used in Microsoft Flight Simulator can and deserve to be used for this type of immersive exercise. But to get an idea of how this might work, it’s mandatory to read about how microsoft’s global flight simulator is created.
Four sets are used to map the Microsoft Flight Simulator edition of Earth. Bing Maps satellite images are used as a base. When combined with earth elevation data, it ends with a charming setting at 10,000 feet.
Hundreds of key cities are also mapped using intense photogrammetry. New York buildings, for example, are extruded by photo analysis. The result is horizons when flying, but they have a tendency to look harshly at street level.
Other buildings and villages are populated with the assistance of procedural generation. The game uses OpenStreetMap knowledge for construction features, filling cities with suitable models. This gives a 3-d modeled blank environment at any altitude, plus the bizarre challenge as a 212-story monolithic design looming over the suburbs of Melbourne.
Other parts of the world, adding airports, have been filled manually through developer Asobo Studio. Combine those and load some of the most realistic clouds ever created, and you’ll end up with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The assets in question are so epic that much of the knowledge of the symbols will have to be spread from the servers, even after a 100 GB installation.
The same technique for building the global would not work on a fitness platform designed to allow you to run and navigate a genuine virtual edition of the global. Microsoft Flight Simulator is primarily designed for view from the sky, not 6 feet off the ground.
However, a replacement is all that is needed.
Zoom directly on Google Maps and Apple Maps and see the point of 3D modeling that is already in position in the existing map software. London, New York and San Francisco, for example, already look like the 3D maps of a video game.
Expand further on Google Maps and the view will move to Street View, the key resource for street-level environmental mapping at the scale we’re talking about here. Apple and Google have very high-resolution photographs covering millions of miles of roads and pedestrian areas. Microsoft’s choice by Bing, Streetside, is much weaker in this regard.
Apple has already moved ahead of Google in creating a perfect virtual edition of the genuine global that can also “navigate”. He took Look Around to Maps in iOS 13, which combines three-dimensional modeling with the knowledge of flat symbols to make street-level transitions transparent.
Take an arrangement for Look Around and add it to Apple Maps city across the city. Lately, fourteen sites have them:
Transform knowledge of stationary symbols taken through Apple maps to capture cars in a compelling motion. Using Look Around as a frame, Apple can simply create the world’s most complex virtual racing and cycling platform.
What’s next? Apply device learning to eliminate cars and others captured through Apple cameras and 3D models and frame textures. Add pedestrians and virtual avatars that represent others on the platform. It would have a fitness platform as dynamic as Zwift, but much more realistic.
Creating itineraries can be a game for everyone or connected to smaller spaces to give the world the impression of being more densely populated. A million kilometers of routes or a thousand are valid options.
This type of fitness “game”, of course, is also a pretty extensive application to run, just like Microsoft Flight Simulator. However, what greater excuse would there be for a counterfeit subscription payment than those who paint directly on a Microsoft xCloud, PS Now, or Google Stadia server service?
Apple announces a smart motorcycle with “Apple World Workouts” that would possibly look like a chimera. So who else can expand this kind of software?
iFit can make this task a reality. It now allows you to create itineraries in Street View slideshow images. There is already a partnership with Google.
Its parent company, ICON Health and Fitness, also owns NodicTrack and Pro-Form, which produce quality consumer training motorcycles with iFit integration. All your motorcycles and treadmills have automatic adjustments in resistance, speed or tilt via Bluetooth. Those with treadmills and low-end training motorcycles can feel the settings on the ground, even if the software itself is displayed on an iPad, Android pickup or TV.
It is uncertain whether iFit would be in such an intensive developmental allocation.
“We are a personal company. We’ve made sure we need to stay profitable. We’re probably still adopting a more calculated technique to grow our business,” iFit President Mark Watterson recently told me when asked about the effect of his rival Peloton with his main spending strategy.
Another company is already doing something similar to what’s presented here, VZfit. This company was known in the past as VirZoom.
Connect a real virtual headset to a smart motorcycle or cadence sensor, allowing your pedaling on a general training motorcycle to suit the on-screen action. It offers a lot of games and fundamental exercises on the knowledge of Google Street View.
These Street View units offer much smoother transitions than iFit’ units, but are still in a collection of knowledge of rudimentary symbols, with annoying symbol alterations when one font symbol moves to the next.
Virtual reality headsets also don’t have a position in the serious distance education apparatus at this time. You’ll be too sweaty without a thick foam padding glued to your face through an elastic band.
So where are we now? Unless a start-up seems to have millions of venture capital budget just for this idea, Apple and Google are the dream developers of this fantastic project. They are the symbol and knowledge of the map needed to achieve this. They have enough cash to do the task properly.
Another angle of fitness for your wallets would not harm any of the brands. The platform can be sold as a paid subscription service to Netflix, without spending billions on movie rights and progression studios.
They wouldn’t even want to make their own high-end device for that purpose. Existing smart bikes, turbo trainers, smart treadmills and footpods can do the job, just like they do with Zwift.
Petabytes of knowledge can be discovered on Google and Apple mapping platforms, and their possible use to enrich recently popular home workouts has begun to be explored slightly.
I’ve been writing about the generation for over a decade, focusing on anything you can use, put in a pocket or purse. The guys I have in canopy come with cell phones,
I’ve been writing about the generation for over a decade, focusing on anything you can use, put in a pocket or purse. The themes I have come with mobile phones, fitness generation, computer science and cameras. You’ll find the thousands of news articles, features and reviews I’ve written over the years on WIRED, TechRadar, TrustedReviews, Wareable, Stuff, Pocket-lint and more.