PGR4 vs. Google Streetview: Vegas Edition

February 7th, 2008 · 1 Comment

For quite a few years I’ve been impressed with how amazing the Project Gotham’s team is at rendering reality, and while playing PGR4 the other week, I saw that the only two U.S. cities represented were Vegas and NYC. At first I was a bit bummed because I honestly don’t have any real authority on what those cities look like. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can recognize the Brooklyn Bridge and the Luxor as well as the next guy, but I can’t verifiably say “oh man they even got the McDonalds on the corner there!”

And then I had this idea…I can visit these locations via Google Streetview and verify it! So I did, and I was floored by the accuracy of the PGR team with what exists in these very real locations. And then I got an even crazier idea: show everyone else by compiling it all into a video. The differences are fairly intriguing; seeing where the PGR team made decisions to move a building closer to the street so it can be seen better, or where they might not have obtained licensing and therefore didn’t include the building.

Some interesting tidbits to look for: The construction of a new casino, the famous McDonalds on the strip, the absence of the Planet Hollywood sign, power lines crossing over pedestrian bridges. Please keep in mind while viewing it the variables of my driving speed vs. their aesthetics of where buildings should be located. It won’t always match up exactly, but you can pretty much almost always pause it on any given frame and find amazing photo-real likenesses throughout.

This turned into quite the labor of love to make. First, I had to make sure I captured the video properly. Then, I had to map the route in Streetview and make sure points matched up fairly well throughout. Then, the screengrabs. Oh lord, the screengrabs. There’s 366 of them in my screengrab folder, and I’m pretty sure I used 300 of them (I wound up “driving” a bit further down the strip than I needed to the first time I shot the footage). And I’m not even going to go into the insanity of what I had to do to make all of the images line up.

All told, besides the 300 screengrabs, there were roughly 14,000 frames of footage before I composited it down. I stopped counting the hours on how long this took after I passed 15.

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