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Google Debuts Street View and Mapplets
Today at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Google unveiled two new map features. An O'Reilly blogger describes Street View, which uses 360-degree street-level video from Immersive Media to enable neighborhood walk-throughs in (for now) a few selected areas. The other new feature is Mapplets, which let you embed Google Maps mashups in any Web page. Much more coverage is linked from TechMeme.
The New York MTA Subway stops are now shown on Google Maps. This works on the PC version, but doesn't seem to be active for the mobile version of Google Maps yet. I hope they update this soon.
Dekker Dreyer
Hey, did anyone else notice Google added streets to their maps? Now I can see where the roads are!
TFA's 'Check it out' link takes you right into a streetview-enabled map area. Interesting to just walk/drive along the enabled road, following the familiar Google-ish road markings, now projected in 3D into to the view.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wow. Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years! No evidence needed (and I aint even a MSFT hater.)
Thats all great and stuff, but when will they add exit numbers? It's a pretty basic thing along the lines of labeling road names as far as I'm concerned.
Morphing Software
While I do find all the map enhancements useful when planning trips to areas I've never been or viewing an area I'm going to be forced to move into without being able to physically look it over (college student going on co-ops), how long until these types of services link up with 'security cameras' and we or 'them' can get live shots of the areas?
These street views are amazing. Some of the shots are pretty high res - people on streets, through windows - I bet if you look hard enough you could see inside of people's homes - hmm, a new crop of google treasure hunts - find the guy in his window. How many people can you find breaking traffic laws? Hmm, how many people will go look up their cities and find their bfriend's car in front of a stranger's place! ;) so many fun things...
Are there any potential privacy laws google could break by making these photos so readily available online?
Cool, we're almost there. While this needs dedicated hardware today, and thus dedicated surveillance of areas to be displayed, as digital cameras get integrated GPS and people post those pictures on the web, Google can index the EXIF tags, and do some image processing (based on embedded lens and exposure data) to get us this kind of experience anywhere somebody has taken a/enough picture(s).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Here's a video grab showing Street View in action - this looks & feels amazing, albeit there's potential privacy issues due to the level of detail (you can make out individual faces, license plates and so on):
Uh Oh, people might see you in a public place.
No seriously, If you're walking along the side of a road, driving your car on a road, what expectation of privacy do you have here. Are taking pictures of people and vehicles illegal now, do I need to go back and blur out all faces and license plates?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
could we please have a moratorium on that word? The quicker it (and the jizzmops that use it) dies the better.
Go to the street view of Times Square and what do you see? A big billboard for Yahoo.
3 3,-122.420654&sspn=1.051842,1.867676&ie=UTF8&om=0& layer=c&cbll=40.756663,-73.986495&cbp=1,156.292682 926829,0.5,0&ll=40.763544,-73.987255&spn=0.013392, 0.031028&z=15
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=37.8488
I know Google themselves didn't collect the data, but it's still kind of amusing.
This stuff makes scoping out someone's house soooo much easier.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
So how long now 'til we can play Grand Theft Auto:Earth?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I REALLY FUCKING HATE THE WORD "MASHUPS" !!!!!!!! Apparently there were too many caps in my post, so I typed this to change the cap/lc ratio. Bite that you yelling detectors!
A little more programming and this can become a second Second Life ?
Wired has some pictures of the kind of car rig that takes these street-level panoramas.
Damn, I thought it said Muppets.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I typed in my own address, and by zooming in all the way on the street view photo, I was able to very clearly see my dog sitting in the window, staring directly at the camera. Scary.
Now we can have 3d images of every place on earth. Finally i can set up my stalking routine a little more carefully. I can also plan a better escape for robbing a bank!
Umm.. Hasnt that street view crap been availible for some time now? What the point? Its a fruitless effort on Googles behalf. Its over-engineering at its finest, and its limited to only the places that Google's little truck has visited. I guarantee you that you'll never see my hometown on maps.google.com's "Street view".
After seeing the dude in the orange jump suit on their demo, I dont know if I want to even use Google at all anymore. That was traumatic. (Oh, that and the fact that since they bought out YouTube, they canceled my account that contained a couple of hilarious South Park moments that I captured via MythTV, I think it was 6 clips of the funniest South Park moments I've ever witnessed, each being less than 20 seconds long. Thats advertising for South Park and viacom. They were lil' mini commercials, if u will... but no they bent over to that whole DMCA bullshit and canned my account which not only had those 6 clips, but a whole world of links to other YouTube videos, and many videos that I created myself.)
Screw you Viacom! Screw you Google! And screw you nerd-freak in the orange jumpsuit.
(btw, I tried to boycott them altogether but their new monopoly on the internet prevented that from ever happening - have u ever tried to use MSN Live? You'd know what I mean)
search for "500 State Street Brooklyn NY" and move west along state street. The camera gets stuck in traffic and the address keeps moving along. Additionally, 500 State Street isn't what it's supposed to be http://www.mro.org/firelotus/firelotus/index.shtml . It's cool and all that they did this, but I'm not impressed with it's usefulness.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
To try it just click 3D view on a major city. It really is quite beautiful once it's done loading, but it takes a helluva long time on my system to load. I think it's the bandwidth that's the limiting factor on it, since my computer is pretty up to spec.
Sorry, I meant to say move East not West.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
Actually, this was one of the first really interesting uses I had thought of for it. Albeit, not for stalking.
Combined with the already excellent HousingMaps (google maps + Craigslist apartment listings) hack this would be a great way to get a view of potential apartments... well, from the outside at least. If photos are available (and for a good chunk of San Francisco they thankfully are) you can even get a quick, vague overview of the neighborhood without having to go all the way out there first.
Or everyone's favorite: Google Theft Auto V
God spoke to me.
I count at least three of the "Use of Cameras Prohibited, Strictly Enforced" signs on the Triboro.
The competition between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google over all these features is wonderful, but as each new feature is announced they work only in a few major cities and in some cases there seems to be no prospects for a wider roll out. While New York and Silicon Valley may have 3D rotating virtual reality animations large parts of the coastline are still low resolution 8 year old images. This is starting to look more like a pissing contest between the big players rather than anything that will be useful in the near term for most Americans (let alone other countries).
For comparison I picked a random part of Washington DC and zoomed in using Microsoft maps to see the 3D view, which (since Google isn't there yet with this feature, would put MS in the lead as far as usability for my general area) but as I zoomed in I noticed that I was looking at a construction site and during my zoom the construction went from bare dirt to a fully developed community (ie the closer pictures were more up to date). Well, thats nice, but in general it is very distracting to see roads change and seasons come and go as you zoom in or out of an area. Google is no better with often old fuzzy-to-the-point-of-useless sections right up next to crystal clear housetop photos, with no rhyme nor reason to which sections are sharp and which are fuzzy. At least with Google the image resolution doesn't change as you zoom in or out, but I've certainly been following a road in mid density areas and found that the road would be clear enough to see vehicles on it in one section and then almost impossible to discern the road from the surrounding objects in the next.
Let's face it: ALL the imagery is a nice to have not a need to have. The cartoon maps are good enough for navigation. But if they are going to present us with imagery at all, isn't it time some of these things get out of the laboratory phase and into something more closely resembling production?
I "walked" through my neighborhood with this thing. Damn, it was a weird feeling. Another quality stalking tool from Google!
... if it saves a few car trips around the neighbourhood to scope out places to live. :)
Now I don't have to go to SF, I'll just spend a a few hours online "walking" the place!
ISO certified == THX certified
those annoying "current affairs" shows ...
It is sad that I read that and the first thing I hear is
"Hi. I am Mike Moore, and this is Frontline!"
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.
The blue '06 Infiniti G35 in the center of the picture, with the license plate conveniently obscured by the "City of Palo Alto Parking" sign.
Oh, and my I-key is fine.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Although I completely agree with you on the matter of "privacy", I do believe there is a social norm which dictates that it is rude to photograph someone without their permission.
I have no inkling of any such norm. Instead I have a large number of books filled with street photography, much of which was taken very much without the subjects knowledge or permission or even awareness.
While this is not exactly in the same artistic category, I personally agree that there simply is no expecation that images cannot be recorded of you at any moment you are in public view - that to me includes standing at your window in full view of the street!
If you want true privacy and eliminate any chance of stray images capturing you, get enough land or move somewhere remote enough that you can have it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hi,
...
;-)
pagesjaunes.fr (the French yellow pages) did already better years back, they had shot pictures of each streets from Paris and other major cities from France.
See http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/
This is quite convenient, if you have to use the metro. Before you arive somewhere you can see the exact way you will take and identify the building you have to go visually.
Not sure anybody provided a mashup with google maps or mappy by the way
So for once, google is lagging
Rgs,
TM
Google maps now shows bus stops in Seattle with schedules for next bus along the line. Only thing missing now is the ferry schedule nearby...
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
You can't look up and down.
The above is rather off-topic. All the same, I severely doubt that Google's failure to come up with a 'light-hearted' memorial day design was anything planned or intentional - unlike the above poster's (obviously an owner or administrator of the extremely right-wing-delusional "little green footballs" website) very obvious intention to paint Google as something "bad". Also, the arguments presented are as ineffective as they are non sequitur - the rather 'light-hearted' poppy is not the symbol of American Memorial Day.
The above post was rather despicable even in its blatant, off-topic slanderous intention. What was its goal, exactly? Why slashdot? Keep the delusional hysteria to your own website, please.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Could this perhaps be the google maps team? :)
t heatre+Parkway&sll=37.750087,-122.467346&sspn=0.19 3009,0.317917&ie=UTF8&ll=37.426999,-122.083125&spn =0.012116,0.01987&t=h&z=16&om=0&layer=c&cbll=37.42 0894,-122.084098&cbp=2,360.672238842947,0.50249733 808249,0/
http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=1600+Amphi
Why is it news that Google now has it, too? Has Google become like Microsoft--so automatically newsworthy that it is automatically news whenever Google copies its competitors?
I played with it A9's version a while, but have never been able to find any practical use for it. At one point I thought I had a use for it--trying to settle a question of how many stories tall a particular building was--but the views didn't show enough in the vertical direction.
And then another time I thought I a use for it--verifying the exact name of a building. Specifically, I was trying to find out whether the signage on the old old John Hancock building, the one on 197 Clarendon Street, actually said "Stephen L. Brown" building or not. The sign or plaque or whatever was obscured by parked trucks.
Meanwhile, it appears that Google Maps does not currently have any street level views of Boston at all.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
For some reason, the state made this program with tax money:a sp
http://www.dot7.state.pa.us/ividlog/video_locate.
it only works in IE, but the images are pretty cool.. it's very extensive too
if only google could index this information
In truth, Google is willing to honor the fallen of every country--except their own.
How pathetic. That is what 'honoring' means to you? Some fucking website banner?
It's all about symbols to idiots like you. Fucking flags, and bumper stickers, and logos, and catch phrases and sound bites.
http://toronto.virtualcity.ca/ has had street level images for Toronto for some time now, and combines it with Google Maps. Works pretty nice.
When will Google Earth have this in it?
You are simply pulling that "social norm" out of your a@@.
There is no such thing in the US neither. You simply are paranoid and over sensitive.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So what you're saying is that you've never tried to take pictures of people without their permission.
That's what I'm saying. I've been doing this for years. Sometimes if I want a closeup, like I want to get a picture of someone from a few inches - sure I'll ask. But lots of times I'll just point and click and wave and smile after (if they even see me taking a picture). And I've never had a problem with this. And that's a picture focused on a specific person or set of people.
For the stuff Google is doing, wide angle shots of an area, asking for permission is even less meaningful. How many times have you taken a picture of a large building or other area with a crowd of people? Do you ask the permission of every person on the scene? Or do you just take the picture?
It's very nice and all that you want to ask peoples permissions before you shoot them, but that's not how you get great pictures. Once people know you are taking their pictures they usually act very differently, and usually not in the way that made them interesting enough to photograph in the first place.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After reading the Shape of the Future speech by Charlie Stross, about how many of us in the future will carry a GPS-enabled, internet-connected video and audio recorder, I am wondering if this sort of technology will find its way into a Google Maps "street view"-like interface. It would be very interesting to be able to click on a person on the street map and see/hear what they are experiencing, if they "opt in" to the system of course. For instance, you would be able to see a riot as it occurred, or watch the ball drop in Times Square, or witness any event in real-time. Virtual vacationing would be possible just by clicking on various people, wherever you want to be, and "living" through them vicariously. Alternatively, you could click on a street address or intersection and have it cycle through the views of people in that region. That way you could tell if it was raining, congested with traffic, etc.. This would also solve the problem of the information being out of date...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Believe us, we all care very deeply.
What we need is parking.google.com which is a further development in maps, where google maps any and all available parking spots, lots, and garages in any given area. Often times finding your way around is not even the hard part...finding a place to put your car is.
Unfortunately, poppies aren't a recognized symbol for that in the US, so they don't have the same easy out for our memorial day as they're using for the others. While they should definitely try harder, their reason for not having done so yet is at least a little more valid than you make it sound.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
Did I mention the zoom function is neat too??
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Actually, as cool as the "birds-eye view" is, Microsoft already did this exact thing (street-level view) last year... Although it looks like they haven't touched it since launch:
2 8/540724.aspx
http://preview.local.live.com/
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2006/02/
I was physically chased down by three young men just two days ago when I was taking pictures for my work in an empty industrial area downtown. I was assaulted years ago under similar circumstances, and I expected the worst. Instead, they harrassed me for photographing a buidling they didn't want me to photograph (a soup kitchen that includes transitional housing for the poor).
They claimed to work there, and were obviously ignorant of laws regarding photography in public places. I didn't try to educate them, just kept walking, handed them my card, and was soon picked up by my driver.
Which type of behavior is more rude, problematic, and socially unacceptable? Legally operating a camera in a public place (which in my case is necessary for my work), or a group of strangers confronting you with hostility because they don't like what you're doing?
News photographers and videographers have been murdered in the line of duty (it happened twice in Somalia). The greater harm is not documenting something in public, but verbal/physical assaults on people who do.
This is a regular problem for me no matter how deferential or considerate I am. I am confronted both in the US and abroad, even by people I'm NOT photographing because they don't like what I am photographing. The idea that permission is either legally required or "socially necessary" should be dispelled.
Having said that, candid photography is better when you don't get the a subject's consent, and posed photography is better with the subject's consent, but this is more about good photography than good manners.www.cgstock.com
http://streetviewr.com/ has a bunch of links to weird/broken ones up already.
There is a way to get around taking people's photograph without their permission. My knowledge on photography is very little, but if they just lengthen the exposure time for the camera, only the static buildings will show up (I think). I don't know if this will work for digial cameras though. Maybe they can just photoshop everybody out or take photos at 3:00 am. Just superimpose a daytime sky on the background and play around with the brightness setting.
Demand java and flash and a quick computer - Microsoft and intel loves you!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
When will they update the satellite images? There's an awful lot of new roads popping up where I live that don't show up on the satellite images. These images are useful so I can see some landmarks to look for while driving and what the turn/lane markings are before getting there.
OK, am I the only one who read that as "O'Reilly Whore 2.0 Conference" ?
People chasing you and assaulting you is a pretty big indicator of a social norm. I'm not defending the action, I'm merely pointing out that the norm exists and you violate it at your own peril.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Social norms" don't take precedence over people's human rights, though. I was assaulted earlier because I was the wrong skin color for the neighborhood I lived in at the time. I had a right to live there, regardless of any "social norm".
The first amendment right to free speech says a person can take a photo in public no matter who objects. Assaulting that person is against the law, and harrassing them shows a lack of respect for their rights.
ALL serious photographers are harassed and receive complaints for taking photos, no matter if they got permission in advance or what they are photographing. I got permission from a U.S. military information officer to photograph a relief operation, yet another officer still threatened to take away my camera because he didn't get the memo. The only way to not upset other people is to never take any photos or video and never write any articles. Short of that, someone will always be upset, which is why freedom of speech and of the press is protected.
www.cgstock.com
This seems to have been just added to normal Google maps.
Pittsburgh light rail (T, Trolley) stations now seem to have active schedules.
This link is near a station. Click on the station and it will show you when the next trains depart. Clicking on "view more upcoming departures" does not seem to give any new info.
http://www.davidsterry.com/streetview http://www.laudontech.com/StreetView/streetview.ht ml
http://www.streetviewr.com/