Live video in a 3D world is cool, and it's not even Google

It sure looks like Google Earth, but it's not.

A company called Sentinel, funded by the U.S. Defense Department, has posted a demo of its client software on YouTube that shows the viewer flying through 3D cityscapes with live videos embedded in them.

A higher-quality version is on the Sentinel site.

The software, AVE Video Fusion, "combines Google Earth-like features with live camera videos projected on a 3D model" the video caption says. "This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch using C++ and OpenGL." It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.

Applications include wide-area surveillance systems such as those at military bases, airports, railroad stations, borders, coastlines, harbors, and power plants, according to Sentinel's site.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer science and electrical engineering professors at the University of Southern California.

Here's the five-minute YouTube video:

The AVE Video Fusion software seamlessly blends five video streams onto a 3D model of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., in this screenshot.

(Credit: Sentinel)

This screenshot shows a live USB camera and 18 live TV feeds projected onto monitors in a lab in Hong Kong.

(Credit: Sentinel)

[JaisonPuthusser]

wa..very impressing.....

[Scott Nelle]

Typo in the first caption. Apparently they forgot the name of their own company. :D

[fire1fl]

Terminator III - the war of the machines. Cruise missile to follow....

[jw1ls5n0129]

I think it will get better ,at this moment its at the start of what it will or can be .

[jkizer]

Hope it has free version. After all, our tax dollars paid for it in part.

[stevecale]

Don't expect to play with this. I went to their webpage and they won't even sell you the software without you calling them. If they won't list a price, it's beyond my budget.

[Zorched]

Not really competition for Google though. Google Earth is free, AVE is not.

Although being derived from data obtained through taxpayer dollars, one would think it should be free.

[kscheinblum]

Am I the only one that's not a little freaked? The thought of anyone with internet access watching me mow the lawn without my tee shirt should scare you; not a pretty sight. Not that I'm paranoid, but what's to prevent someone from watching your house and knowing in real-time when no one is home thereby making a robbery easier? If you think hard, there are even worse scenarios. Once this software is in the wild, expensive or not, the genie is out of the bottle.