Monday, October 25, 2021

View Your House Under Water

The picture above shows how the Louvre art gallery might appear after global sea level rises have flooded Paris. I created this imagined view of the Louvre using ThisClimateDoesNotExit.  

ThisClimateDoesNotExist is a clever Google Street View based application which allows you to see how your house might look after your street has flooded. To create an imagined view of your flooded house you just need to type your address into ThisClimateDoesNotExist's Google Map. If Google Street View imagery is available at this address you can then view an 'AI' generated image of your home under a few feet of water. 

ThisClimateDoesNotExist claims to be "an AI-driven experience based on empathy". What this means is that the application does not use any real rising sea level predictions to picture your house under water. It just portrays an imagined scenario. As long as the user is clear that the enhanced Street View image isn't based on any real climate change science then the generated picture of an address can have a strong emotional impact. Nobody wants to really see their home flooded by rising waters. 

I suspect that ThisClimateDoesNotExist may use the GSVPanoDepth Street View depth library to create such realistic looking imagined scenes.

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