Google Enhances Street View With User Photos

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.

Comments

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[the_womble]

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,

Re:uhg silverlight works in linux

[Hadlock]

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.