Google Earth comes alive! View real-time traffic and people onscreen.

Cunningly clever researchers from Georgia Tech have come up with a way of taking real-time, real-world information from CCTV cameras and layering it onto a ‘live’ Google Earth, so you’ll be able to watch events happening live onscreen.

Single and multiple live video feeds are analysed to calculate the position and motion of various objects, which is then combined with behavioural simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Motion capture technology can be used to help extrapolate the motion of cars along entire stretch of road, using just a few camera angles. The video above even shows a football game being viewed live using multiple CCTV cameras.

We can only just get our head around it all (and, to be honest, we’re trying hard not to shake off the notion that it’s all a bit scary too), but the researchers will be presenting their paper at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality next month.

Read a  draft PDF here.