Google Debuts Street View and Mapplets

Today at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Google unveiled two new map features. An O'Reilly blogger describes Street View, which uses 360-degree street-level video from Immersive Media to enable neighborhood walk-throughs in (for now) a few selected areas. The other new feature is Mapplets, which let you embed Google Maps mashups in any Web page. Much more coverage is linked from TechMeme.

Editors?

TFS disagrees with TFA about what a "mapplet" is. From TFA #1:

A Mapplet is a special flavor of a Google Gadget, the XML/JavaScript-based widgets you can add to iGoogle - only that this time, you'll be adding it to Google Maps. From a press release by Google: Mapplets enables third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle.

Subways!

The New York MTA Subway stops are now shown on Google Maps. This works on the PC version, but doesn't seem to be active for the mobile version of Google Maps yet. I hope they update this soon.

Yes, it is actually very cool.

TFA's 'Check it out' link takes you right into a streetview-enabled map area. Interesting to just walk/drive along the enabled road, following the familiar Google-ish road markings, now projected in 3D into to the view.

Waiting for Need For Speed 2010 Google World

Or everyone's favorite: Google Theft Auto V

Exit Numbers

Thats all great and stuff, but when will they add exit numbers? It's a pretty basic thing along the lines of labeling road names as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Exit Numbers

They are there now. See this link [google.com] for example. The numbers in the green bubbles.

Awesome - any landmines?

These street views are amazing. Some of the shots are pretty high res - people on streets, through windows - I bet if you look hard enough you could see inside of people's homes - hmm, a new crop of google treasure hunts - find the guy in his window. How many people can you find breaking traffic laws? Hmm, how many people will go look up their cities and find their bfriend's car in front of a stranger's place! ;) so many fun things...

Are there any potential privacy laws google could break by making these photos so readily available online?

Today the Cities, Tomorrow the World

Cool, we're almost there [slashdot.org]. While this needs dedicated hardware today, and thus dedicated surveillance of areas to be displayed, as digital cameras get integrated GPS and people post those pictures on the web, Google can index the EXIF tags, and do some image processing (based on embedded lens and exposure data) to get us this kind of experience anywhere somebody has taken a/enough picture(s).

Uh Oh

Here's a video grab showing Street View in action - this looks & feels amazing, albeit there's potential privacy issues due to the level of detail (you can make out individual faces, license plates and so on):

Uh Oh, people might see you in a public place.

No seriously, If you're walking along the side of a road, driving your car on a road, what expectation of privacy do you have here. Are taking pictures of people and vehicles illegal now, do I need to go back and blur out all faces and license plates?

Re:Uh Oh

Although I completely agree with you on the matter of "privacy", I do believe there is a social norm which dictates that it is rude to photograph someone without their permission. That's the problem we have with paparazzi, and those annoying "current affairs" shows that go around with their cameras trying to get people on tape telling them to fuck off, as if it somehow exposes their guilt. These people get punched in the face not because of some expectation of privacy, but because they are violating a social norm. Especially when they continue filming after they have been told to stop. If you want a dose of this yourself, go down to the beach and take some pictures.. you'll be quickly approached by men responding to their girlfriend's squeels of "he's taking our picture!" It's just not acceptable behaviour.

Re:Uh Oh

You make a decent point. But the way something like Big Brother comes in, is as in most changes to society, it creeps in.

No matter how you look at it, this is a loss of privacy. 20 years ago, you could expect to walk in a public place, and there would be no record of you ever being there. Now, in places like the UK, you are captured all the time, and these recrods can be kept for a long time. So we have lost privacy going out in a public place. The next step is some form of recognition software that can track individuals, everywhere they go.

So where do you draw the line? When do YOU start to get upset. Or are you one of these people who are happy for the government and private industry to know where you are at all times? If that doesn't bother you (whether you never do anything wrong or not), then you have a problem. If that doesn't bother most people in this world (and I think it won't), then we all have a problem.

mashup mashup mashup

could we please have a moratorium on that word? The quicker it (and the jizzmops that use it) dies the better.

Re:mashup mashup mashup

If you cry just a little is that a "crylet"?

Yahoo Ad in Times Square

Go to the street view of Times Square and what do you see? A big billboard for Yahoo.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=37.84883 3,-122.420654&sspn=1.051842,1.867676&ie=UTF8&om=0& layer=c&cbll=40.756663,-73.986495&cbp=1,156.292682 926829,0.5,0&ll=40.763544,-73.987255&spn=0.013392, 0.031028&z=15 [google.com]

I know Google themselves didn't collect the data, but it's still kind of amusing.

Wow, it's a great century to be a stalker

This stuff makes scoping out someone's house soooo much easier.

Games

So how long now 'til we can play Grand Theft Auto:Earth?

Oh FFS

I REALLY FUCKING HATE THE WORD "MASHUPS" !!!!!!!! Apparently there were too many caps in my post, so I typed this to change the cap/lc ratio. Bite that you yelling detectors!

Perhaps....

A little more programming and this can become a second Second Life ?

The car that takes these kind of pictures

Wired has some pictures [wired.com] of the kind of car rig that takes these street-level panoramas.

Mapplets

Damn, I thought it said Muppets.

I can see my dog.

I typed in my own address, and by zooming in all the way on the street view photo, I was able to very clearly see my dog sitting in the window, staring directly at the camera. Scary.

Got stuck in traffic in brooklyn

search for "500 State Street Brooklyn NY" and move west along state street. The camera gets stuck in traffic and the address keeps moving along. Additionally, 500 State Street isn't what it's supposed to be http://www.mro.org/firelotus/firelotus/index.shtml [mro.org]. It's cool and all that they did this, but I'm not impressed with it's usefulness.

Live 3D view is very cool

Also new is Microsoft's (yeah, yeah, boo, hiss) 3D view update to maps.live.com [slashdot.org]. Similar to Google Earth, but integrated directly into their website, albeit with plug-in. Shockingly, they even support Firefox with a separate plug-in I hear.

To try it just click 3D view on a major city. It really is quite beautiful once it's done loading, but it takes a helluva long time on my system to load. I think it's the bandwidth that's the limiting factor on it, since my computer is pretty up to spec.

Triboro Bridge

I count at least three of the "Use of Cameras Prohibited, Strictly Enforced" signs on the Triboro.

When will it get to my city?

The competition between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google over all these features is wonderful, but as each new feature is announced they work only in a few major cities and in some cases there seems to be no prospects for a wider roll out. While New York and Silicon Valley may have 3D rotating virtual reality animations large parts of the coastline are still low resolution 8 year old images. This is starting to look more like a pissing contest between the big players rather than anything that will be useful in the near term for most Americans (let alone other countries).

For comparison I picked a random part of Washington DC and zoomed in using Microsoft maps to see the 3D view, which (since Google isn't there yet with this feature, would put MS in the lead as far as usability for my general area) but as I zoomed in I noticed that I was looking at a construction site and during my zoom the construction went from bare dirt to a fully developed community (ie the closer pictures were more up to date). Well, thats nice, but in general it is very distracting to see roads change and seasons come and go as you zoom in or out of an area. Google is no better with often old fuzzy-to-the-point-of-useless sections right up next to crystal clear housetop photos, with no rhyme nor reason to which sections are sharp and which are fuzzy. At least with Google the image resolution doesn't change as you zoom in or out, but I've certainly been following a road in mid density areas and found that the road would be clear enough to see vehicles on it in one section and then almost impossible to discern the road from the surrounding objects in the next.

Let's face it: ALL the imagery is a nice to have not a need to have. The cartoon maps are good enough for navigation. But if they are going to present us with imagery at all, isn't it time some of these things get out of the laboratory phase and into something more closely resembling production?

Immersive Media and Street Views

All of the non-San Francisco Street View data is provided by a company called Immersive Media [immersivemedia.com]. They have a special omnidirectional video sensor with 11 elements that shoots 30 frames per second. The 11 cameras do a great job rejecting glare from the sun. Compare the SF footage with the Las Vegas footage and look for sun glare overriding the sensor. At street speeds, there is about 1 image every 3 to 5 inches. Street View is showing you one frame every 30 to 100 or so.

The Teleatlas camera car doesn't shoot panoramas, the cameras are too far away to avoid massive parallax errors and their cameras are pretty narrow field of view. I'm sure the collect very good POI data, though. The survey vehicles used for the Immersive Media dataset are actually Volkswagon Beetles, there is a tiny picture on the Immersive Media homepage. The camera can actually see down most of the way to the road and anything other than a Beetle has a pretty big footprint in the image. The camera system also see straight up even though the Flash viewer in Street View does not. It's actually the warping of the pixels to make the view that is the weakest link in the distribution chain.

The vehicles have the camera system and a special inertial positioning system that provides survey grade coordinates as the vehicle moves down the road even underground. That system is made by Applanix and it's the same type of system used by many of the Darpa Grand Challenge Candidates.

All this adds up to many TBs of data and although it isn't easy to stream on the web, they have figured out how to do it. If you visit the demo page [immersivemedia.com] you can see full motion video panoramas that you can drag and look up, down, left and right in! Requires Shockwave from Adobe. The streaming isn't as sharp as the original product but it gives you an idea of navigating an Immersive movie. Sort of like Quicktime VR but it is really a movie!

Immersive Media has collected data all over North America, you can see the complete extent of their collects and browse some clips [immersivemedia.com]. We also just announced a major expansion into Europe so we'll see you blokes over the pond soon!

Full Disclosure: I wire the systems on the Beetles and write post-processing software for Immersive Media. I've trained a lot of drivers in how to run inertial positioning systems and I'm really pleased that data I support is finally being seen by people! And feel free to Slashdot the demo page, the servers are waiting to show you our movies. Remember to click and drag to look around, this isn't boring old static web video where you look where we tell you too.

I found my car

The blue '06 Infiniti G35 in the center of the picture [google.com], with the license plate conveniently obscured by the "City of Palo Alto Parking" sign.

Oh, and my I-key is fine.

Bus stops in Seattle

Google maps now shows bus stops [google.com] in Seattle with schedules for next bus along the line. Only thing missing now is the ferry schedule nearby...

Pah, useless

You can't look up and down.

Smile!

Could this perhaps be the google maps team? :)

http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=1600+Amphit heatre+Parkway&sll=37.750087,-122.467346&sspn=0.19 3009,0.317917&ie=UTF8&ll=37.426999,-122.083125&spn =0.012116,0.01987&t=h&z=16&om=0&layer=c&cbll=37.42 0894,-122.084098&cbp=2,360.672238842947,0.50249733 808249,0/ [google.com]

A9.com has had this for years.

Why is it news that Google now has it, too? Has Google become like Microsoft--so automatically newsworthy that it is automatically news whenever Google copies its competitors?

I played with it A9's version a while, but have never been able to find any practical use for it. At one point I thought I had a use for it--trying to settle a question of how many stories tall a particular building was--but the views didn't show enough in the vertical direction.

And then another time I thought I a use for it--verifying the exact name of a building. Specifically, I was trying to find out whether the signage on the old old John Hancock building, the one on 197 Clarendon Street, actually said "Stephen L. Brown" building or not. The sign or plaque or whatever was obscured by parked trucks.

Meanwhile, it appears that Google Maps does not currently have any street level views of Boston at all.

PennDOT

For some reason, the state made this program with tax money:
http://www.dot7.state.pa.us/ividlog/video_locate.a sp [state.pa.us]

it only works in IE, but the images are pretty cool.. it's very extensive too
if only google could index this information

Also in Toronto via a different website

http://toronto.virtualcity.ca/ [virtualcity.ca] has had street level images for Toronto for some time now, and combines it with Google Maps. Works pretty nice.

When will Google Earth have this in it?

When will Google Earth have this in it?

Where this is potentially headed

After reading the Shape of the Future speech [slashdot.org] by Charlie Stross, about how many of us in the future will carry a GPS-enabled, internet-connected video and audio recorder, I am wondering if this sort of technology will find its way into a Google Maps "street view"-like interface. It would be very interesting to be able to click on a person on the street map and see/hear what they are experiencing, if they "opt in" to the system of course. For instance, you would be able to see a riot as it occurred, or watch the ball drop in Times Square, or witness any event in real-time. Virtual vacationing would be possible just by clicking on various people, wherever you want to be, and "living" through them vicariously. Alternatively, you could click on a street address or intersection and have it cycle through the views of people in that region. That way you could tell if it was raining, congested with traffic, etc.. This would also solve the problem of the information being out of date...

Google Parking!

What we need is parking.google.com which is a further development in maps, where google maps any and all available parking spots, lots, and garages in any given area. Often times finding your way around is not even the hard part...finding a place to put your car is.

Which will be very slow

Demand java and flash and a quick computer - Microsoft and intel loves you!

Great, but...

When will they update the satellite images? There's an awful lot of new roads popping up where I live that don't show up on the satellite images. These images are useful so I can see some landmarks to look for while driving and what the turn/lane markings are before getting there.

A few sites catalogging these views

http://www.davidsterry.com/streetview [davidsterry.com] http://www.laudontech.com/StreetView/streetview.ht ml [laudontech.com] http://www.streetviewr.com/ [streetviewr.com]

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

They did it over a year ago. But it looks like the project may have been abandoned: http://preview.local.live.com/ [live.com] Also, A9 (Amazon) had something similar but they got rid of it.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

Its not exactly the same thing, but MS's map thing (whatever they call all their MSN/"Live" stuff these days), does have what they call "birds eye" view. It only works in IE, and its not ground level, but it still works fairly well. You can easily see landmarks and stuff to help you find places. And its a lot better quality than the satellite photos (and not straight down), you can easily see people and stuff in the photos. I think they have their birds eye view thing for around six months if my memory serves me, so I would give MS a little credit. They do make some cool stuff occasionally.

Its not available everywhere, but I'm sure its available more places than Google's street view is(it looks like only Manhattan, Miami, Denver, San Francisco and Vegas have it now). Google maps has a lot of cool stuff, but it would be nice if they offered some of the cooler stuff in places other than just the five or ten biggest cities. Granted, some of it wouldn't be as helpful in smaller cities or in the suburbs, but it would still be make it more useful to a lot of the population.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

Much like Windows Media Player, the Microsoft site was poorly designed, clunky, wasted precious screen real estate, and doesnt work around the typical user queries. Google's version almost predicts the features I want and works accordingly. I'm not purposely MSFT-bashing, its just that the difference is vast.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

ts not exactly the same thing, but MS's map thing (whatever they call all their MSN/"Live" stuff these days), does have what they call "birds eye" view. It only works in IE, and its not ground level, but it still works fairly well. You can easily see landmarks and stuff to help you find places.

You lost me at IE...

Re:great, more flash crap

Believe us, we all care very deeply.

Re:Troll

Believe us, we all care very deeply.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

I submitted a story about the "bird's eye view" function on maps.live.com, it's much more useful in my opinion. It seems to cover more places and you can rotate to see things from whaterver direction, N, S, E, or W. The angled view lets you see things like how the face of a building looks.