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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.
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.
They are there now. See this link for example. The numbers in the green bubbles.
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.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Or everyone's favorite: Google Theft Auto V
God spoke to me.
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.