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.

Comments

Editors?

[lenroc]

TFS disagrees with TFA about what a "mapplet" is. From TFA #1:

A Mapplet is a special flavor of a Google Gadget, the XML/JavaScript-based widgets you can add to iGoogle - only that this time, you'll be adding it to Google Maps. From a press release by Google: Mapplets enables third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle.

Exit Numbers

[Ark42]

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.

Re:Exit Numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

They are there now. See this link for example. The numbers in the green bubbles.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[tiffany98121]

They did it over a year ago. But it looks like the project may have been abandoned: http://preview.local.live.com/ Also, A9 (Amazon) had something similar but they got rid of it.

Awesome - any landmines?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Awesome - any landmines?

[flyingsquid]

I found a pretty cool Easter egg on Google Earth the other day, while digitally roaming through the Gobi Desert. Fire up Google Earth and click "fly to" and then paste in the coordinates 40.4026777778, 99.7833888889 , which will take you to Inner Mongolia. You can see a couple of Badger bombers, Antonov An-12 transports, a Beriev A-50 AWACS plane, some Mig-19s, a couple of Mig-21 Fishbeds, and a few cool-as-all-hell Mig-29 Flankers. Not that I know that much about Russian-made aircraft, I was simply able to figure out what they were using (what else?) Google. It's a pretty amazing tool, though the Chinese must be pissed that so many of their military establishments can now be checked out by anyone with an internet connection...

Re:Awesome - any landmines?

[l-ascorbic]

Not just Google Earth: it's on Google Maps too.

Uh Oh

[OverlordQ]

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?

Re:Uh Oh

[QuantumG]

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. That's the problem we have with paparazzi, and those annoying "current affairs" shows that go around with their cameras trying to get people on tape telling them to fuck off, as if it somehow exposes their guilt. These people get punched in the face not because of some expectation of privacy, but because they are violating a social norm. Especially when they continue filming after they have been told to stop. If you want a dose of this yourself, go down to the beach and take some pictures.. you'll be quickly approached by men responding to their girlfriend's squeels of "he's taking our picture!" It's just not acceptable behaviour.

Re:Uh Oh

[mgblst]

You make a decent point. But the way something like Big Brother comes in, is as in most changes to society, it creeps in.

No matter how you look at it, this is a loss of privacy. 20 years ago, you could expect to walk in a public place, and there would be no record of you ever being there. Now, in places like the UK, you are captured all the time, and these recrods can be kept for a long time. So we have lost privacy going out in a public place. The next step is some form of recognition software that can track individuals, everywhere they go.

So where do you draw the line? When do YOU start to get upset. Or are you one of these people who are happy for the government and private industry to know where you are at all times? If that doesn't bother you (whether you never do anything wrong or not), then you have a problem. If that doesn't bother most people in this world (and I think it won't), then we all have a problem.

Re:Uh Oh

[enjahova]

You act like its the government or some organization that is solely responsible for this invasion of privacy. It's just the natural progression of technology. You ask when do we get upset, where do we draw the line? There is no line, there is no revolution to be had. Cell phones are in the hundreds of millions world wide, camera phones are in the millions. How long before every camera is also has gps, and effortlessly syncs with any computer. Hell, it could just hop on whatever wifi and dump your pics online. Do you really think you could rebel against every person? This is technology you are against, not Big Brother.

You and I may think its wrong or rude or a "problem" that people invade our privacy and post pictures on line, but give it one or two generations of myspace and facebook, and whatever else the internet and technology throws our way. To you, it will look like the world has gone to shit, that privacy is non-existant and everybody is crazy. It has already happened to some extent, just like you said. Look 20 years ago, or look at people who were adults 20 years ago. A large percentage of them won't go anywhere near facebook or myspace. They don't understand it, they think if you do that everyone can see your life and your privacy is totally gone. But we do it everyday.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[imemyself]

Its not exactly the same thing, but MS's map thing (whatever they call all their MSN/"Live" stuff these days), does have what they call "birds eye" view. It only works in IE, and its not ground level, but it still works fairly well. You can easily see landmarks and stuff to help you find places. And its a lot better quality than the satellite photos (and not straight down), you can easily see people and stuff in the photos. I think they have their birds eye view thing for around six months if my memory serves me, so I would give MS a little credit. They do make some cool stuff occasionally.

Its not available everywhere, but I'm sure its available more places than Google's street view is(it looks like only Manhattan, Miami, Denver, San Francisco and Vegas have it now). Google maps has a lot of cool stuff, but it would be nice if they offered some of the cooler stuff in places other than just the five or ten biggest cities. Granted, some of it wouldn't be as helpful in smaller cities or in the suburbs, but it would still be make it more useful to a lot of the population.

Yahoo Ad in Times Square

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the street view of Times Square and what do you see? A big billboard for Yahoo.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=37.84883 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

I know Google themselves didn't collect the data, but it's still kind of amusing.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[SRA8]

Much like Windows Media Player, the Microsoft site was poorly designed, clunky, wasted precious screen real estate, and doesnt work around the typical user queries. Google's version almost predicts the features I want and works accordingly. I'm not purposely MSFT-bashing, its just that the difference is vast.

Games

[hack slash]

So how long now 'til we can play Grand Theft Auto:Earth?

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[Beetle B.]

ts not exactly the same thing, but MS's map thing (whatever they call all their MSN/"Live" stuff these days), does have what they call "birds eye" view. It only works in IE, and its not ground level, but it still works fairly well. You can easily see landmarks and stuff to help you find places.

You lost me at IE...

The car that takes these kind of pictures

[grouchomarxist]

Wired has some pictures of the kind of car rig that takes these street-level panoramas.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[Osty]

ts not exactly the same thing, but MS's map thing (whatever they call all their MSN/"Live" stuff these days), does have what they call "birds eye" view. It only works in IE, and its not ground level, but it still works fairly well. You can easily see landmarks and stuff to help you find places.

You lost me at IE...

That's too bad, because the bird's eye view works just fine in Firefox (not in Opera, though, and I don't have a way to test against Safari/Konqueror at the moment). I just verified it, and you can, too. Here's Microsoft's headquarters, in bird's eye view. View the link in Firefox, and all is good.

Bird's eye view is just using different images for the tiles, and the only limitation is whether or not Microsoft (or whoever they buy their data from) has flown planes over the area to take pictures. As the grandparent said, it's not the same as being street level, but it's still quite detailed -- I can clearly see my truck parked outside of my house in bird's eye view. The same truck just looks like a white blob in aerial or hybrid view.

Mapplets

[jd]

Damn, I thought it said Muppets.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[imemyself]

Interesting, it didn't work for me with Firefox 2.0. But I looked at the useragent, and apparently FF 2.0 uses a useragent like BonEcho/2.0.0.1, instead of Firefox/2.0.0.1. When I changed it to Firefox (like it was in previous releases) it worked fine. With BonEcho it just showed a small, boring looking map. Same thing with Opera. I wonder why the Mozilla folks changed the useragent in 2.0.

Got stuck in traffic in brooklyn

[Tharkban]

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.

Waiting for Need For Speed 2010 Google World

[CrazyJim1]

Or everyone's favorite: Google Theft Auto V

Triboro Bridge

[Anonymous Coward]

I count at least three of the "Use of Cameras Prohibited, Strictly Enforced" signs on the Triboro.

Re:Triboro Bridge

[martinX]

Got any pics?

When will it get to my city?

[cmacb]

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?

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[imemyself]

Yeah, someone else posted something about that. It works find in Firefox, except that in my copy of Firefox 2.0 (actually the repackaged version by FrontMotion, that I can deploy and manage via Group Policy), the useragent is BonEcho, as opposed to Firefox. And if its not set to Firefox, then it takes me to the "old" ugly map. I'm not sure if its just with FrontMotion that the useragent is not Firefox, or if its with all Firefox 2.0 releases. I've found references to both user-agents with BonEcho/2.0.x.x, and Firefox/2.0.x.x.

Immersive Media and Street Views

[PotatoPhysics]

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.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[Osty]

Interesting, it didn't work for me with Firefox 2.0. But I looked at the useragent, and apparently FF 2.0 uses a useragent like BonEcho/2.0.0.1, instead of Firefox/2.0.0.1. When I changed it to Firefox (like it was in previous releases) it worked fine. With BonEcho it just showed a small, boring looking map. Same thing with Opera. I wonder why the Mozilla folks changed the useragent in 2.0.

I don't believe you're actually using Firefox 2.0. Or rather, you're using a very old alpha release (Bon Echo was the Firefox2 codename in development). Upgrade your browser :).

That said, this seems typical for Microsoft. They "get" that they need to support Firefox and other non-IE browsers, but they do so in the crappiest of ways -- using UA string detection. UA detection is obvious and "easy". It basically creates a "fail by default" model, where if you're not doing exactly what is expected then it just refuses to work. This is easier to build and test than a proper object detection mechanism which may have strange edge cases when the objects you need are supported in a browser but don't quite act the same way. It's possible to do, but it's a lot of work to get right and I bet that the Windows Live guys decided that just getting it working was more important than getting it right. If you use your BonEcho UA on other Live properties (Spaces, live.com, Expo, QnA, etc), they'll probably fail in a similar fashion.

I've fought that fight several times myself, and each time I end up losing because doing the right thing is hard and there's just no time to do it and all of the other high-priority work items. The only way to ever win that argument is to change priorities -- if working on all possible browsers was priority #1, there'd always be time to do it right even if another feature or two had to wait for a later release. If working on IE6/7 is pri1, working on Firefox (but not other Gecko-based browsers, like Seamonkey, Galleon, or K-meleon, even though if you did the right thing they'd just work) is pri2, and working on anything else is pri3, guess what'll happen? Yep, a quick regex against the UA for "Firefox", and if you don't find it then bail out.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[stony3k]

Ah! That explains it - if you remember the Debian Iceweasel stink a while back, non-official releases are not allowed to be named Firefox. Hence your browser identifies itself as Bon-Echo.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[Osty]

Just a quick follow-up on my previous post regarding UAs. If you set Opera to identify as IE or Firefox via the per-site preferences (details here), it renders Live Maps almost perfectly. Compare:

• Opera 9.10 identifying as itself
• Opera 9.10 identifying as Firefox viewing the Microsoft campus in bird's eye mode (I specifically closed the scratchpad, as I was unable to remove items from it and really didn't want to post my own address on the interwebs even in picture form)

Playing around with Live Maps in Opera-as-Firefox, I noticed the following few issues:

• Scroll-wheel zoom doesn't work. Scroll-wheel zoom does work in Opera on Google Maps, so this is not a problem native to Opera (such as not exposing events to hook scrolling).
• There are obvious layout problems, but only with the floating controls. IMHO, those need to be cleaned up and re-arranged anyway, so I don't mind them being in the wrong places.
• Some hover controls are missing. Hovering over an item in the scratchpad doesn't produce the popup that allows you to clear the entry, for example.
• Missing close controls on some items. Specifcally, the "Welcome" box is missing its closed "X".

Aside from the scroll-wheel zoom, all other functionality works, and actually works quite well. More importantly, if 95% of the site works in Opera, I'd be willing to bet that 95% of the site works in Konqueror/Safari or any other modern browser. What's left is a matter of a few specific fixes for minor functionality, some layout adjustments that could serve as a catalyst for a better interface, and a move away from UA reliance.

Re:How is that the norm at all?

[kisielk]

I'm a photographer. I shoot people on the street all the time. I've yet to ever have anyone get angry or hostile at me for taking their photograph. In fact, many people actually enjoy having their photo taken and will react positively if you point your camera at them. Most of the rest just assume you must be trying to photograph something else and they're standing in the way, so they'll do their best to move. I'm not aware of any "social norm" neither here in Canada nor in Japan where I lived that dictates you shouldn't take photographs of people in public.

Re:mashup mashup mashup

[Ohreally_factor]

If you cry just a little is that a "crylet"?