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DIY Google Street View Project?
Ismenio writes "Does anyone have any ideas for a do-it-yourself Google-Street-View-like project on the cheap? I am planning to visit a few places outside the US that are important to me, and would like to be able to set up a site for friends and family to visit and give them the Street View-like experience so that they could navigate, pan and zoom in the areas I have. Though being able to use GPS coordinates would be great, that's certainly something I can do without. I know I can take pictures and stitch them together to create panoramic views, but I would like to be able to also navigate though some streets. Would it make sense to record it with an HD camera, then batch export frames as pictures? Is there any software in the open source community that I can use?" Ismenio includes links to some related pages: Popular Mechanics' look at the camera tech used for Street View, and a company that claims better panoramic image technology than Google's.
Basically, webcams suck for this. They get washed out and are basically worthless. Also the CPU required is prohibitive.
IPcams, while better, have limited resolution.
So you're really looking at using cameras run through libgphoto and some custom scripts. You need a lot of storage, and you need the right camera.
It's doable with gphoto and a handful of Canon cameras, but be prepared to spend lots of $YOUR_LOCAL_CURRENCY.
OTOH, if you get a travelcam going, I'd love to contribute; I haven't given up hope yet.
If you look at rtrees, you can even look up the nearest landmark and tag your images with '2.3 miles southeast of $BIG_BEAUTIFUL_LANDMARK.
Have a look at this project:
openstreetview.org.uk
The map data is from the Openstreetmap Project.
There's also a discussion going on about openstreetview in the talk mailing list of OSM.