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

uh silverlight works in linux

[MushMouth]

Try Moonlight.

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

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[tepples]

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a version behind Microsoft Silverlight, resulting in Silverlight apps displaying only "your Silverlight plug-in is outdated".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.

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[JohnyDog]

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.

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[sopssa]

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.

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[pherthyl]

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.

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:A whole lot of math

[biryokumaru]

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

Brownies

[l00sr]

...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.

Your Facts Are Getting in the Way of His Agenda

[RobotRunAmok]

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.

photos

[owlnation]

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.

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.

Re:uhg silverlight works in linux

[node 3]

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.