Slashdot Mirror

A well functioning company who devote all of their efforts to multimedia and optimization of multimedia routines will always outperform something which has to be implemented by every browser individually. This is particularly true given that no browser team will have adobes resources, know-how and clout gained through producing editing software, effects software, audio software, image software etc. This will only end once the multimedia demand ceiling is hit like it was with the audio playback industry where the majority have been happy to settle for mp3s because they can barely tell the difference in effective quality given anything better. So I don't think we're there yet and html video will not do all the cool OSX style stuff that flash is starting to do: (top of the page) http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/features/ or interactive 3d video (yeh really) http://demos.immersivemedia.com/index.php?clip=WW1 For quite some time to come. Not to mention interactive webcam videos, live video compositing and transforming, dynamic compiled filters etc. I am, however, glad that interactivity through html and flash is basically javascript adressing different DOMS.

Eh, pardon the formatting on that last one.. accidentally chose html over plain text and didn't preview :/

In any case, here's it again, this time along with a mirror for the flash file in case their site gets hammered from the original link:

Eh, it's actually pretty good... check out the flash file that that viewer is displaying:

http://demos.immersivemedia.com/fvdemo_1/data/CylindricalFlashPlayerDemoSite/PopularMechanicsNYCDriveAlong/video.flv

Mirror here: http://g.appleguru.org/nycpano.flv

Open that without their custom flash player and you get 1024x512 video... And I'd imagine they're recording higher than that.

Also, check out some of the actual shots in google: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=32.734512,-117.159705&spn=0.024981,0.05373&z=15&om=1&layer=c&cbll=32.72197,-117.161636&cbp=2,356.38393784103107,,1,-18.177554028083662&title=Google%20Maps&source=k

Pan around that one and double click to zoom in on the license plates of the cars on the street. You can zoom in VERY far.. and read them.

Eh, it's actually pretty good... check out the flash file that that viewer is displaying: http://demos.immersivemedia.com/fvdemo_1/data/CylindricalFlashPlayerDemoSite/PopularMechanicsNYCDriveAlong/video.flv Open that without their custom flash player and you get 1024x512 video... And I'd imagine they're recording higher than that. Also, check out some of the actual shots in google: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=32.734512,-117.159705&spn=0.024981,0.05373&z=15&om=1&layer=c&cbll=32.72197,-117.161636&cbp=2,356.38393784103107,,1,-18.177554028083662&title=Google Maps&source=k Pan around that one and double click to zoom in on the license plates of the cars on the street. You can zoom in VERY far.. and read them.

All of the non-San Francisco Street View data is provided by a company called Immersive Media. They have a special omnidirectional video sensor with 11 elements that shoots 30 frames per second. The 11 cameras do a great job rejecting glare from the sun. Compare the SF footage with the Las Vegas footage and look for sun glare overriding the sensor. At street speeds, there is about 1 image every 3 to 5 inches. Street View is showing you one frame every 30 to 100 or so.

The Teleatlas camera car doesn't shoot panoramas, the cameras are too far away to avoid massive parallax errors and their cameras are pretty narrow field of view. I'm sure the collect very good POI data, though. The survey vehicles used for the Immersive Media dataset are actually Volkswagon Beetles, there is a tiny picture on the Immersive Media homepage. The camera can actually see down most of the way to the road and anything other than a Beetle has a pretty big footprint in the image. The camera system also see straight up even though the Flash viewer in Street View does not. It's actually the warping of the pixels to make the view that is the weakest link in the distribution chain.

The vehicles have the camera system and a special inertial positioning system that provides survey grade coordinates as the vehicle moves down the road even underground. That system is made by Applanix and it's the same type of system used by many of the Darpa Grand Challenge Candidates.

All this adds up to many TBs of data and although it isn't easy to stream on the web, they have figured out how to do it. If you visit the demo page you can see full motion video panoramas that you can drag and look up, down, left and right in! Requires Shockwave from Adobe. The streaming isn't as sharp as the original product but it gives you an idea of navigating an Immersive movie. Sort of like Quicktime VR but it is really a movie!

Immersive Media has collected data all over North America, you can see the complete extent of their collects and browse some clips. We also just announced a major expansion into Europe so we'll see you blokes over the pond soon!

Full Disclosure: I wire the systems on the Beetles and write post-processing software for Immersive Media. I've trained a lot of drivers in how to run inertial positioning systems and I'm really pleased that data I support is finally being seen by people! And feel free to Slashdot the demo page, the servers are waiting to show you our movies. Remember to click and drag to look around, this isn't boring old static web video where you look where we tell you too.

All of the non-San Francisco Street View data is provided by a company called Immersive Media. They have a special omnidirectional video sensor with 11 elements that shoots 30 frames per second. The 11 cameras do a great job rejecting glare from the sun. Compare the SF footage with the Las Vegas footage and look for sun glare overriding the sensor. At street speeds, there is about 1 image every 3 to 5 inches. Street View is showing you one frame every 30 to 100 or so.

The Teleatlas camera car doesn't shoot panoramas, the cameras are too far away to avoid massive parallax errors and their cameras are pretty narrow field of view. I'm sure the collect very good POI data, though. The survey vehicles used for the Immersive Media dataset are actually Volkswagon Beetles, there is a tiny picture on the Immersive Media homepage. The camera can actually see down most of the way to the road and anything other than a Beetle has a pretty big footprint in the image. The camera system also see straight up even though the Flash viewer in Street View does not. It's actually the warping of the pixels to make the view that is the weakest link in the distribution chain.

The vehicles have the camera system and a special inertial positioning system that provides survey grade coordinates as the vehicle moves down the road even underground. That system is made by Applanix and it's the same type of system used by many of the Darpa Grand Challenge Candidates.

All this adds up to many TBs of data and although it isn't easy to stream on the web, they have figured out how to do it. If you visit the demo page you can see full motion video panoramas that you can drag and look up, down, left and right in! Requires Shockwave from Adobe. The streaming isn't as sharp as the original product but it gives you an idea of navigating an Immersive movie. Sort of like Quicktime VR but it is really a movie!

Immersive Media has collected data all over North America, you can see the complete extent of their collects and browse some clips. We also just announced a major expansion into Europe so we'll see you blokes over the pond soon!

Full Disclosure: I wire the systems on the Beetles and write post-processing software for Immersive Media. I've trained a lot of drivers in how to run inertial positioning systems and I'm really pleased that data I support is finally being seen by people! And feel free to Slashdot the demo page, the servers are waiting to show you our movies. Remember to click and drag to look around, this isn't boring old static web video where you look where we tell you too.

All of the non-San Francisco Street View data is provided by a company called Immersive Media. They have a special omnidirectional video sensor with 11 elements that shoots 30 frames per second. The 11 cameras do a great job rejecting glare from the sun. Compare the SF footage with the Las Vegas footage and look for sun glare overriding the sensor. At street speeds, there is about 1 image every 3 to 5 inches. Street View is showing you one frame every 30 to 100 or so.

The Teleatlas camera car doesn't shoot panoramas, the cameras are too far away to avoid massive parallax errors and their cameras are pretty narrow field of view. I'm sure the collect very good POI data, though. The survey vehicles used for the Immersive Media dataset are actually Volkswagon Beetles, there is a tiny picture on the Immersive Media homepage. The camera can actually see down most of the way to the road and anything other than a Beetle has a pretty big footprint in the image. The camera system also see straight up even though the Flash viewer in Street View does not. It's actually the warping of the pixels to make the view that is the weakest link in the distribution chain.

The vehicles have the camera system and a special inertial positioning system that provides survey grade coordinates as the vehicle moves down the road even underground. That system is made by Applanix and it's the same type of system used by many of the Darpa Grand Challenge Candidates.

All this adds up to many TBs of data and although it isn't easy to stream on the web, they have figured out how to do it. If you visit the demo page you can see full motion video panoramas that you can drag and look up, down, left and right in! Requires Shockwave from Adobe. The streaming isn't as sharp as the original product but it gives you an idea of navigating an Immersive movie. Sort of like Quicktime VR but it is really a movie!

Immersive Media has collected data all over North America, you can see the complete extent of their collects and browse some clips. We also just announced a major expansion into Europe so we'll see you blokes over the pond soon!

Full Disclosure: I wire the systems on the Beetles and write post-processing software for Immersive Media. I've trained a lot of drivers in how to run inertial positioning systems and I'm really pleased that data I support is finally being seen by people! And feel free to Slashdot the demo page, the servers are waiting to show you our movies. Remember to click and drag to look around, this isn't boring old static web video where you look where we tell you too.

At Siggraph this year, there were two similar systems on display. They are unbelievably cool.

1) Point Gray's Ladybug2 has five cameras mounted in a box about the size of, say, a stack of three decks of cards.

2) Immersive Media's system has 11 (!) cameras in a sphere about 2 inches on a side.

Both systems do real-time stitching of the multiple images into a panorama.

We're looking into them for the obvious motion-picture visual effects applications. The resolution (both spatial and dynamic) is not ideal for motion-picture work, but the ability to have an extremely small, lightweight, panoramic capture is a tradeoff that is worthy of pursuit. In the past (say, on The Fast and The Furious) we used six ARRI 435 cameras mounted to the side of a motorcycle, to the tune of several thousand dollars a day rental, hundreds of pounds of weight, and fairly compromised images in other ways (bad lens flare, extremely bouncy images.)

Thad Beier
Hammerhead Productions

• 
  Be Here
  Immersive Media
  Imove
  Ipix
  Enroute