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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.

25 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. uh silverlight works in linux by MushMouth · · Score: 4, Informative

    Try Moonlight.

    http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

    1. Re:uh silverlight works in linux by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Moonlight has two drawbacks:
      • Moonlight is perpetually a version behind Microsoft Silverlight, resulting in Silverlight apps displaying only "your Silverlight plug-in is outdated".
      • Outside Microsoft, a major use for Silverlight is to stream video with digital restrictions management to make it significantly harder to save to the viewer's PC. Free software is fundamentally incompatible with this DRM.
    2. Re:uh silverlight works in linux by JohnyDog · · Score: 4, Informative

      Try Moonlight.

      When stable Moonlight 1.0 was released as stable version about a year ago i tried it, only to be greeted by 'Silverlight 2.0 required, won't work with 1.0' on most non-demo pages.
      This christmas someone posted me a photosynth link, i saw that Moonlight finally reached 2.0 stable release, so i again tried it, only to be greeted with 'Silverlight 3.0 required, won't work on 2.0' on photosynth and most other pages. Maybe someday in future there will be at least few day window when the silverlight app requirements match the available moonlight version, but it's not today.

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

      How is B) any different than the use of Flash (which this Johnny-Come-Lately google app uses)? Especially considering Moonlight is fully open source, which no version of flash 10 is.

    5. Re:uh silverlight works in linux by sopssa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But that's only the Linux developers fault as they're lagging behind on the specs. The specs are out there to code it, you can't really blame MS for it.

    6. Re:uh silverlight works in linux by pherthyl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure you can. If Microsoft wants to replace Flash then they damn well should be supporting Linux. If they don't then they shouldn't be surprised that some people will avoid Silverlight. It's not the communities' job to do Microsoft's porting work for them, just like Adobe doesn't expect the community to write a Linux flash client.

    7. Re:uh silverlight works in linux by Rayban · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How does Moonlight figure into it? That's like saying Flash is open-source because Gnash exists. Both are incomplete re-implementations of proprietary plugins. Neither of them can catch up to the canonical implementation.

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    8. 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,

  2. Re:uhg silverlight works in linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Run! It's a trap!

  3. 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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    1. Re:A whole lot of math by biryokumaru · · Score: 4, Funny

      Mine was "I hope no one tries to post a picture of the Korean War Memorial."

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  4. Re:Why this beats Microsoft by alen · · Score: 2, Informative

    did you not read the part where it says that this requires Flash?

  5. Brownies by l00sr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash

    I'm thinking of making some crack brownies that are delicious and unlike pot brownies--which have pot in them and are therefore dangerous--have crack in them.

  6. 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).

  7. Your Facts Are Getting in the Way of His Agenda by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 4, Funny

    Note to Slashdot Editors: Apps that avoid the use of Flash are Less Evil than Apps which do not run in Linux.

    And please, if you're ever unclear on any of this Good/Evil stuff, don't hesitate to ask me.

  8. 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.

  9. photos by owlnation · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I hope there's someone vetting the pics. One of the most annoying aspects of Panoramico, is that there's more than a few narcissists who post pics of things like "our dog Benji at the beach," rather than an informative pic that will enhance the Google Earth user-experience.

    Still... if no-one is vetting the pics, there is a LOT of fun to be had with this.

  10. Re:Why this beats Microsoft by sopssa · · Score: 2, Funny

    Good luck trying to use these features on your iPad. So much for multiplatform.

  11. 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?

  12. 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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  13. Why the Java hate? by tonywestonuk · · Score: 3, Funny

    Why not do this as an Applet, not Flash.... After all, Java is FOSS, and works on all platforms. Applets launch fast, (unless they have megabytes of Jars to load, though this problem is not just with Java).

  14. Re:uhg silverlight works in linux by node+3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    The video you are referring to is a demo that required a guy with a camera to stream live for the presentation. Google's system actually works right now.

    MS is superb at giving tech demos. They are even better at timing them to most strongly attack their opponents. But what they are awful at is delivering. Until MS gets enough cameras placed everywhere so that you can reasonably expect, even if primarily only in metropolitan areas, that they will have a camera view you can access, it's just going to be a cool gimmick that will have a camera on the Eiffel Tower, and one at Times Square, and maybe three in Seattle.

    As of right now, they don't even have *one* set up anywhere.

    It's fairly impressive, however, the way MS has this down to an art. They show this cool tech off, and everyone remembers how cool it is, and now existing products have to compete against an imaginary MS product that doesn't even exist and will most likely not exist any time soon.

    They tried this with Surface when the iPhone debuted. That backfired, but even so, Suface, the demo, is damned cool. Surface, the reality, is a gimmick.