Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
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.
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.
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.
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...
Beetle B.
Wired has some pictures of the kind of car rig that takes these street-level panoramas.
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.
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)
Or everyone's favorite: Google Theft Auto V
God spoke to me.
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?
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.
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.If you cry just a little is that a "crylet"?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.