Street Slide: Coming Soon to Bing?

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Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360° panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective "strip" panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.

The movie below provides an overview of the system:




In a paper at SIGGRAPH Microsoft presented Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multiperspective strip panoramas. They demonstrated a seamless transition between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas presenting a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes many of the limitations of previous systems.

As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion.

You can view the paper here (13Mb, .pdf), with Microsofts Patent recently approved, it looks like this should be coming to Bing soon.

Bing Streetside: Flickr in 3D Space, 3D Transitions and Notable Potential

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Microsoft have just just rolled out a new application that is currently in a tech preview phase that pulls photos from Flickr®, associates them with Bing Maps Streetside photos and then overlays them by stretching the photo to form fit where in the world it belongs. The new application called Streetside Photos is currently available in Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver (Canada) to view your Flickr photos in a whole new way. We gave it a spin this morning and captured the video below, it has huge potential to view historic photos and crowd source the latest imagery.

Note how the 3D transitions between scenes and how the photos become part of the panorama:



See the post over on the Microsoft site for full details on Streetside or jump direct to the Streetside Photos application.

Adverts in Street View - Could be Video?

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We noted last week via Gizmodo that Google has Google's filed a patent entitled "Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising," which in short allows them to paste media (adverts) onto the images.


Its interesting how the mouse in Street View follows the 3D space, we assume to allow any data to be tagged to buildings etc. With data of course comes the ability to provide click throughs and advertising. We dont think it will limited to simple images however as video can also be embedded into panoramas as one of our previous examples shows:


San Francisco Panorama with Embedded Video from digitalurban on Vimeo.

The example was quite easy to produce, we used the real estate of Twin Peaks in San Francisco, but this could of easily been an advert above Buckingham Palace and then that's when things get interesting...

View the live version of the San Francisco video embedded in panoramic space.

Google Street View in the UK? / Crowd Sourcing for Commercial Gain

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The BBC have a good article online looking at opposition to introducing Street View to Google Maps in the UK. Apparently Google started capturing London this week.

The main issue is with the UK's privacy laws where people cannot be photographed without consent if the output is to be used for commercial gain - as is the case with Google Maps. There is also the issue of privacy in terms of houses appearing on the Internet - we did some work for Camden Council a while back and that was removed from the web due to issues with houses being identified in 360 x180 degree photographs.

The BBC article is well worth a read, especially for the quotes from the Privacy International Group.

We know Google have done a lot of good for mapping etc and we at digital urban are one of their strongest supporters but recently with their launch of MapMaker some criticism is emerging - see Google Wants to be TeleAtlas at the OpenGeoData Blog.

Web 2.0 is all well and good but companies are starting to use Neogeographers and Crowd Sourcing for their own commercial gain. Although of note is the word 'free' and the availability of free data, regardless of source, has changed the world of geographical information behind recognition over the last couple of years.

Its a controversial subject, as our in-box is testament to resulting in this being a revised version of the original post, we will have more thoughts on this in future posts...

Geolocate Comments in Panoramas: Street View in China by City 8

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City8.com in China have a unique take on the use of panoramas to provide information about the city. Systems such as Google's Street View provide a blanket coverage of the road system but in reality are little more than 'eye candy'. City 8 on the other hand allows users to tag information inside the panorama - creating a simple yet effective way to geolocate comments and info on the urban environment.

The YouTube movie below provides an insight:



Take a look at http://www.city8.com for more info...

MapJack - Sneak Peak at Flash Street View (Beta)

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After our side by side comparasion of MapJack, Everyscape and Google's Street View a couple of days ago the people behind MapJack have been in touch with regards a new beta version running in flash.

Screen grabbed above the new version, planned to preview next week, is an interesting take on the street view concept. Firstly, it allows the user to navigate via the keyboard, creating a semi-immersive way to visualise the city. This interface change is definitely preferable to clicking on hotspots to move onto the next view.

Simple image transitions are also now in place and via a toolbar the way the images are viewed can be changed - note the projection option:

The beta version is well worth a look, the guys behind MapJack have kindly agreed to allow us to publish a sneak look:

http://www.mapjack.com/FlashTest/Index.html

Let us know any thoughts...

MapJack, Google Street View and EveryScape Video Comparisons

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Google's Street View currently leads the field in 360x180 degree street level imaging. A few months ago we put up a post and movie about EveryScape another company covering San Francisco with beta imagery and now we have MapJack as the latest kid on the block.

The concepts between all three are basically the same: to provide blanket street level coverage of a city linked to a map - allowing users to visualise their route step by step. Map Jack's approach is to simplify the process back to set photographic views rather than interactive panoramas ala EveryScape and Google's Street View.

By embedding three movies its possible to gain a basic level of comparison between the three systems, Google Street View, EveryScape and MapJack:

Google Street View


EveryScape



MapJack



We like MapJack for its simplicity and sharp infocus photography. EveryScape has the unique 'morph' feature as you link between scenes and Google Street View is simply highly polished with coverage now extending to San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando.

San Francisco is becoming the stomping ground for new geo-related start up companies and this can only be seen as a good thing. We like MapJack as its simple and easy to follow a route but Google's Street view is still the one to be beaten.

View MapJack

View Everyscape

View Google's Street View

EveryScape - Better than Google Street View (?)

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Google Street View launched only a few weeks ago and now there is a new contender on the block in the shape of EveryScape. Using a different camera system Everyscape allows a full 360x180 field of view as well as the placement of those all important hotlinks (thus advertising revenue) in the scene.

The major selling point is however the transition between scenes, using some clever image precessing each scene is linked using a semi 3D zoom providing continuity to the navigation when compared against Street View.

The movie below provides a quick demo of the system.



Take a look at the EveryScape site to try it out yourself, still in beta stage they have Boston, New York and Seattle coming soon.

Thanks to Andy Hoskins for emailing us the site tip..

Google Street View Image Glitches

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As we mentioned in our post 'Google Street View - A Closer Look' the technology is subject to the cameras going out of alignment. This, combined with image flare, can create errors in the scene and a Flickr user by the name of Stallio has been grabbing screen shots to illustrate the point. See the Flickr slide show below for the images so far:



Take a look at the Google Street View Glitch set on Flickr for more info.

Google Street View - A Closer Look

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As we posted a couple of days ago Google have added panoramas to their Google Maps services with the launch of Street View. Currently available for Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York new areas will be added over the coming months.

The YouTube movie below from Google explains the concept:



Taking a closer look the data is provided by Immersive Media Corp, a digital video imaging company founded in 1994 captured in what is basically streaming video linked to a GPS. Using an 11 lens camera system (pictured right, see 'What is Immersive Media' for more info) data is streamed in and merged in realtime to provide panoramic video. See the Immersive Demo page for examples.

We used an early unit five years ago to capture panoramas around London, the system is easy to set up, basically the camera is mounted via a suction cup to the roof of a car and the data saved via a small form PC.

Pictured below is the car used to capture the images for Google:

The YouTube movie below highlights the use Google Street View in San Francisco - note the ability to zoom but also the numerous problems with stitching and image matching:



While the Immersive system is indeed impressive it does suffer from problems due to cameras going out of alignment and changing lighting levels between each of the 11 views. As such although it allows the rapid capture of cities - all you need to do is drive each route - the quality sometimes leaves a lot to be desired when compared with the more traditional panoramic techniques.

The image below highlights these issues:


Perhaps of more interest to the panoramic community as a whole is the ability to link in your own views using the recently released KML 2.2 beta specifications. This includes the ability to tile images, perhaps allowing fully immersive, high resolution panoramas in both Google Earth and Google Maps.

You can view the Street View direct from here.

Google Maps Street View - 360 Panoramas from Google

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Google have added panoramas to their Google Maps services with the launch today of Street View. Available for Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York new areas will be added over the coming months. The YouTube movie below from Google explains the concept:



Captured using vehicle based panoramic cameras linked to a GPS the innovative nature of the panoramic views is the way in which the interface has been developed. The track of the next available view floats in '3D' space within the panorama allowing a seamless way to navigate between scenes.

You can view the Street View direct from here, to be honest you cannot fail to be impressed.

Thanks got to Andreas Bovens of Chosaq.net for bringing this to our attention. See also Google Blogoscoped for more info.