Imagine if the first soldiers to enter an enemy city could map it street by street, recording every window and doorway of the urban battlefield in an accurate 3D model that could instantly be relayed to their comrades at base - and updated in near-real time. Thanks to funding from the U.S. military and cooperation from the Virginia engineering firm SET Associates (Science, Engineering, Technology), engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have found a way to do just that.
Of course, this same technology can also make maps for urban planners and tourists, not to mention emergency services who could get quick before and after maps within hours of a major natural disaster. Defense Industry Daily explains "virtualized reality," which may be coming soon to hostile cities - and your city, too.
I am surprised our forces did not already have this capability. It will definitely be helpful.
Rendering takes a LOT of time. You should see the setups they use for movies like "Toy Story" and "Shrek", and how long it still takes to get each scene rendered.
We're a few iterations of Moore's Law away from making this a brute-force proposition, so I suspect there are some pretty clever computing tricks in this setup, along with excellent integration of laser rangefinding, geocoding, and GPS (which are also exploding technologies).
Many inventions are about a merging of maturing technologies to create something new, plus a bit of innovation of the side. James "Connections" Burke is the champ at describing how this works - and it seems to have worked again to create "virtualized reality".