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Google Enhances Street View With User Photos

Posted by kdawson on from the pick-your-point-of-view dept.

Google has launched a competitor or counterpart to Microsoft's Photosynth, which employs user-contributed photos of much-photographed sites to supplement the street-level view in an immersive way. Google's offering is called simply Navigate through User Photos, and unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash. This YouTube video (also embedded at the link above) offers a quick tour of the new feature, which can use photos uploaded to Panoramico, Flickr, and Picasa.

10 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. A whole lot of math by LoudMusic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I noticed this last week sometime. My first thought when I see this technology is always "damn that's a lot of maths".

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  2. Bing's 15 minutes of fame gone... by adosch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So long to the Bing hype done at TED this year. Good idea to incorporate user-submitted photos where the Google StreetView car is not welcomed or... hated. I think as long as the quality, angle and panorama of submitted images are scrutinized for the well-being and wealth of StreetView, it won't be very long before Google has image mapped everything with a road going through it.

    ...so what's the next best way to data mine people's personal vacation photography? Simply invite them to freely contribute to the bigger, shadowed cause. 0_0

    1. Re:Bing's 15 minutes of fame gone... by spagetti_code · · Score: 2, Interesting

      So photo software has been offering facial recognition for a while. When this all gets uploaded to google, you're going to be able to ask (where was X on the given date). Cool. Scary.

    2. Re:Bing's 15 minutes of fame gone... by Tromad · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Except bing maps is far superior to google maps. Google maps is more technical but both bing maps and even mapquest are superior for navigating to unfamiliar areas. Google maps will give you the technical name of the freeway, but bing maps/mapquest will give you the name of the freeway as it appears on the freeway signs (for example going to LAX google will say to get onto the San Deigo freeway, which is true. However, the freeway signs say Santa Monica. Both bing and mapquest say Santa Monica on the printout). In addition, bing maps will give you location markers on the printout (turn right after the 7-11).

  3. Re:uh silverlight works in linux by MushMouth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There is a silverlight 3 beta available which works about as well for me as flash 10. (both crash all the time on my linux 64 bit box)

  4. Old photos by Antidamage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My neighbour has photos of our street from when he was a kid. I'm planning to scan them and put them up. Quite the change over the years.

    1. Re:Old photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I think this is really where the technology becomes useful, archival photos.

      If I could have a slider in the interface to go back through photos from the 'past' in the same location it would be an excellent record of development.

      If only all cameras shipped with GPS for location,compass for direction.. and 3G for realtime uploads :)

      If you had directional information in the photos, you could automatically locate points of interest where directional information intersects (monuments etc.)

  5. Hasn't it been this way for a while? by IANAAC · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I seem to remember seeing user-submitted photos of my place (a random Chicago three-flat) at least a year back.

    Or is this something different?

  6. Re:uh silverlight works in linux by the_womble · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Flash SWF format is open, and Adobe has a better track record than MS on open formats (PDF).

    Linux is no-longer negligible in terms of market share. Its difficult to get numbers, but Ubuntu alone passed 8m users back in 2008 and has been growing since. Add users who are not counted thanks to multiple installs plus apt caching, then add the other distros (with similar adjustments), and you get a total comparable to MacOS,

  7. Re:uhg silverlight works in linux by Hadlock · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I showed that link to my buddy. He responded with this link:
     
    http://www.videosift.com/video/TED-Augmented-reality-using-Bing-maps
     
    Which makes the google demo look like something from 1996 in comparison. (Skip ahead to the 4:20 mark for some jaw-dropping live video overlaid on top of 3D interior shots of pike place market, generated from user pics. Mix that sort of data with technology like this and with enough computing power you could probably render a decent 3D model of the habitated world in a few weeks.

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