On 09/08/2007, at 4:09 AM, Annalee Newitz wrote:
I just had the MOST FRUSTRATING conversation with the project lead on
Google Street View, who refused to acknowledge that anyone was doing
That's a common complaint with Google, as they have so few people
while trying to cover local levels worldwide. I think they've bitten
off more than they can chew, as once they have digitised every city,
they will still face the uphill struggle to keep everything up to date.
I *know* there are awesome hacks/mashups for Street View, including
one
that Mikel Maron worked on at Where Camp. <snip> What else is out
there?
There is a long history of using panoramas for building a virtual
reality. The first venture in this direction was by the amazing
Michael Naimark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map
Further development was Amazon's A9 Street Level view, and there are
numerous other people doing the same kind of thing, including:
MapJack.com
Everyscape.com
Earthmine.com
The military have been doing it for decades with Sentient World
Simulation, and there are numerous numerous projects in academia like:
http://cs.unc.edu/Research/urbanscape/
and about 5 to 10 others that I've found along the same lines.
Rich Gibson from this group is working on an Open Street View, and I
also have my own http://georama.com.au/sa/ as two approaches for the
open source angle.
Microsoft is concentrating on bulk 3d modelling rather than the use
of panoramas as that allows degrees-of-freedom rather than fixed
viewpoints, but it is possible to generate 3d models from the
captured imagery in panoramas so one approach doesn't necessarily
preclude another.
I would suggest that you make your article less about Google and more
about the line of research. Google are not doing anything of much
interest as far as this line of implementation goes, so why bother
writing about them as though they're doing something special?
Steve.
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