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DIY Google Street View Project?
Posted by
timothy
on Sat May 16, 2009 06:48 PM
from the wish-you-were-here dept.
from the wish-you-were-here dept.
Ismenio writes "Does anyone have any ideas for a do-it-yourself Google-Street-View-like project on the cheap? I am planning to visit a few places outside the US that are important to me, and would like to be able to set up a site for friends and family to visit and give them the Street View-like experience so that they could navigate, pan and zoom in the areas I have. Though being able to use GPS coordinates would be great, that's certainly something I can do without. I know I can take pictures and stitch them together to create panoramic views, but I would like to be able to also navigate though some streets. Would it make sense to record it with an HD camera, then batch export frames as pictures? Is there any software in the open source community that I can use?" Ismenio includes links to some related pages: Popular Mechanics' look at the camera tech used for Street View, and a company that claims better panoramic image technology than Google's.
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I worked on this for a while.... (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, webcams suck for this. They get washed out and are basically worthless. Also the CPU required is prohibitive.
IPcams, while better, have limited resolution.
So you're really looking at using cameras run through libgphoto and some custom scripts. You need a lot of storage, and you need the right camera.
It's doable with gphoto and a handful of Canon cameras, but be prepared to spend lots of $YOUR_LOCAL_CURRENCY.
OTOH, if you get a travelcam going, I'd love to contribute; I haven't given up hope yet.
If you look at rtrees, you can even look up the nearest landmark and tag your images with '2.3 miles southeast of $BIG_BEAUTIFUL_LANDMARK.
Re:I worked on this for a while.... (Score:5, Informative)
It's doable with gphoto
libptp
for canons : http://capture.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
others http://www.gphoto.org/doc/remote/ [gphoto.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Gah! You're absolutely right. I had that in mind but my fingers didn't.....
Why not do a Mashup? (Score:4, Informative)
Why bother reinventing the wheel? Google has already done the hard work for you.
Just record your GPS co-ordinates as you travel and then you can do a Google Maps mashup afterwards and people can track your movements through Streetview.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Street View still has fairly limited coverage compared to the world's streets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View [wikipedia.org]
Plan with Google (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We did this in the early ninties. We used a 3CCD pro camcorder and videotaped streets of Toronto, mostly Yorkdale, Kensington, Bloor village and the Danforth. We just walked along, stopped in front of every address and took some stable footage. Then we went home and frame grabbed the best scene for every address.
I swear it takes more time to talk about it than to actually do it.
These days my feeling is anything but the cheapest cel phone wouold work and can't say I really understand the question.
Have you tr
a small collection of tools (Score:5, Informative)
stitching software
virtual tour software
i dont use fisheye, opting for more images for higher resolution pictures. But for the later two, i use and highly recomend autopano pro (http://www.autopano.net/en/) and its virtual tour software that is integrated with the giga version. The stitch imports images and combines them together into one image. The tour provides a simple way to combine the images into a set of 360x180 views, with hot-points between them to navigate, all automaitcally put together into a swf for easy embedding. if you dont mind a few watermarks, you can use the trial version with very few restrictions.
for an example of a high reosution virtual tour created by the stitching software, tyhough without the tour software, i have created a tour of cambridge at http://cambridge.lifeinmegapixels.com/ [lifeinmegapixels.com] . for other examples and examples of the touring software, check the gallery subforum in the autopano pro forums.
Re:a small collection of tools (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
A fisheye lens is recommended: Sigma or Nikkor (Score:4, Informative)
You'll definitely need a panoramic head, using your tripod head will cause parallax problems: cheap - the Panosaurus, expensive: 360Precision.
The most common lenses for panoramic photography are the Sigma 8mm and the Nikkor 10.5mm, but there's also a Sigma 10mm fisheye.
You can also use your rectilinear kit lens. Check out the VRwave Panoramic Lens Database [vrwave.com] to find out how many pictures you need for a full 360x180 pano.
Use PTGui or (the free) Hugin to stitch the pics, with manual controls, or Autopano, for (mostly) automatic stitching.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The quick option would be a "one shot lens" (which is actually a mirror). The quality isn't great, but is the fastest way to shoot a pano.
Re: (Score:2)
Nikon Coolpix has a http://www.nikonweb.com/fisheye/ [slashdot.org]
You would have to take three or four pictures at different directions to get a complete coverage (sky view + three compass directions = tetrahedral arrangement).
Re: (Score:2)
Wow an opportunity for a completely legitimate non-sarcastic FTFY. Glee.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a patent on the use of just two fisheye pictures taken back to back - it belongs to a property agency of all companies; apparently they patented the process of taking two pictures to create a virtual tour of a home. The fisheye lens came with a small utility to create a panoramic view from two such fisheye lens pictures along with the necessary license. However, at the fringes of each picture the blue light tends to bleed more than the red or green, so one or two extra pictures help to average that
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft Photosynth (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've tried photosynth for several different things, just to play with it. Of course, I have to use it from a Windows machine, so my Linux machine is out.
I recently took a panorama of photos of a friends pool area, where she has flowers around the whole thing (like a freakin' garden, just just the occasional flower). Here's the photosynth [photosynth.net].
I tried to follow their guidelines for "best practices". Every frame overlapped. From all four corners, I shot 180 degrees. I overlappe
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry about replying to myself. For the GPS transmission, I had found a tornado hunter group who had a nice little piece of software that they used to track themselves. It uploaded a very small flat file to an FTP server (or HTTP post, if I remember right), containing my current GPS information. I don't remember the name of the software off hand, and I wiped my laptop a while back, so I simply don't have it. You may be able to find it if you google for that information. I don't know th
Re: (Score:2)
One time, on a certain photo, I noticed that if I resized the browser window to be a little smaller than full screen, the photo became instantly clear. But, as soon as I moved the window size bigger than some threshold, it went blurry again. T
Re: (Score:2)
Actually Photosynth started off as a PhD project called Photo Tourism [washington.edu]. You can download the source code of Bundler [washington.edu] (GPL license) as well. The idea of using geo-tagged photos to create a 3D view of the world is really cool. However there are various challenges: occlusion, moving objects (people, foliage, ...), changing illumination, different cameras, cameras with distortion. The software needs to be robust and discard those "outliers".
SceneLib [ic.ac.uk] is a software for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) w
Sounds like a big project (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt it would be worth the effort to create a google street-view clone for your own personal use, you'd either have to carry around a set of cameras the whole time or stay in your car (with the camera(s) mounted on the car).
Personally I've built a small website that shows images I've uploaded from my iPhone using Google Maps, a pretty simple solution that doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment nor a very advanced software setup (on the server it's just apache+mod_python+mysql and a couple of small python scripts for creating thumbnails of the uploaded images.
/Mikael
Re: (Score:2)
I did a drive from Florida to Los Angeles (the length of I-10, plus a little), with a webcam running the whole time. When I had cell service, it was uploading the frames as fast as it could to my web server for friends and family to see. I stored all the frames locally too. At the time, I used a Nextel Im1100 wireless card, that was pathetic at best. It was the best thing I could get at the time, but it was terrible.
I then took the whole drive, and consolidated it into a 5
Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
I know I'll be modded down for this, but it seems that the best, most efficient, and cheapest answer to this problem is as follows:
If you feel so strongly abotu sharing your vacation with people you know, then take some of them with you.
And then, gasp, instead of spending huge piles of money so that you can occupy your vacation fucking with technology that nobody wants to use anyway (Hey, Martha! Look! George sent more pictures of the LOVELY GREAT FUCKING TIME HE'S HAVING over there! Start the fire!), you'll be able to take a few folks who might actually be interested in this stuff along with you.
Just a thought.
(And: To answer the original question of, "Can I do this?" No. No, you can't. Don't bother. Give up.)
Re: (Score:2)
And: To answer the original question of, "Can I do this?" No. No, you can't. Don't bother. Give up.
Hand over the geek card, the correct answer as always is, "yes but its just fucking hard, you could"
1)list of options that don't entirely fit the needs, but would provide a close match
or
2)instructions on how to which opensource software to patch together to provide exactly what is needed (presumably patching is done in a series of bash/perl/python scripts)
Just because your too lazy to mess around with technology doesn't mean everybody on slashdot is, he was hoping for some pointers/software to use and AFAIC
Yep (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Dear AC,
It takes more than some "badass camera equipment" to get a Streetview-like interface to your vacation photos. Someone has to write the software, which is going to be either extremely non-trivial and time-consuming, or monumentally expensive.
Vacations, by and large, are cheap in comparison.
Re: (Score:2)
The sticher program is still a pain in the ass to use, and does take up a lot of time to assemble. he's right - it's not the best use of vacation time.
Maybe Microsoft has an answer? (Score:5, Informative)
WAIT! Don't mod me down yet.
There's this free software called Photosynth that gives a very similar experience. It stitches together large numbers of photographs to create a scene through which a user can move.
They can all be interconnected, or it could be just, "my hotel room" and "famous landmark A" and "famous landmark B." If you take enough pictures on the way to each location, it should be able to figure that out.
Other than that, software projects like photosynth and google street view are massive undertakings and require a great deal of understanding of mathematics, geometry, pattern matching and some terrific coding skills. You likely will not find many alternatives, and something "homebrew" probably won't compete unless you're going to start coding now.
Quicktime VR? (Score:2)
Not exactly cheap, but it might work.
Re: (Score:2)
Not exactly cheap, but it might work.
Not exactly expensive either. Some digital cameras come with bundled software (e.g. Canon PhotoStitch) that can spit out QTVR files, and after some digging in Google and on Apple's site to see what has replaced the old "QuickTime VR Authoring Studio" from Apple, I managed to find Apple's QTVR tools page [apple.com], with a link to ClickHere Design's Cubic Connector [clickheredesign.com.au] for a whopping $79.
If I get sufficiently bored at any point in the near future, I think I'll grab that program and start making virtual tours of all kinds
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting. Last time I checked, QTVR required the use of a rather expensive panoramic head to work well. It seems that this is no longer the case, which makes it a pretty viable option, I think.
Thanks for doing the research I should have done before I posted.
Microsoft Photosynth (Score:4, Insightful)
Purchase a GPS logger, carry it with you everywhere while you take pictures. Or even better, buy/rent a camera with GPS built in.
Next, upload your photos into Microsoft Photosynth. http://photosynth.net/ [photosynth.net]
I've seen demos where it can synthesize multiple photos based on GPS data, and present them in a mapping mode where you can 'walk down the street' using your photos, and other people's photos from the area. Not sure what capabilities have been released in this regard, yet, to the general public.
My project (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.fluffyelephant.com/pano/village.php#menu [fluffyelephant.com]
http://www.fluffyelephant.com/pano/campus.php#menu [fluffyelephant.com]
It turned out pretty well.
Photosynth (Score:5, Informative)
You may want to take a look at Microsoft's Photosynth (usual Microsoft bashing, what about Linux and Mac, I don't want to install silverlight, etc. aside).
What you'll generally find though is that either:
a) You don't shoot enough coverage.
b) You shoot too damn much and it takes forever to upload.
Say you're used to DSLRs. You probably shoot about a 20-30 degree field of coverage at 10mp whenever something interesting comes up.
Your choice is either to shoot as wide as you can... In which case you won't have the detail you're used to when you zoom in on something interesting, leaving it an unidentifiable blur... Or you can take 36 overlapping shots at 10 degree intervals followed by a bunch of vertical passes - but then you're talking 50-100 x 10MP images to upload for every point you shoot from and it takes you half an hour to capture each of them.
Google goes with so low res it'd suck for trying to show people the details of a cool cathedral or whatever else. It's great for figuring out where you are but little more than that. You could shoot 8-10 very wide angle images (14mm lenses on a full frame sensor, etc.) which would get your numbers of files down in exchange for less detail. Still...
Street view takes a picture every 50 feet or so. Simple coverage of say a cathedral will still have you taking about 20 points inside and the same outside.
Even at 8-10 images per location, that's still a couple of hundred... and a few thousand if you want detailed ones. All at say 10MP... That's gigs upon gigs of data to upload, while away (or store on many memory cards) and hours spent doing it... For a single building you want people to be able to truly explore with you.
Or, of course, you just take a few wide shots from a few locations... Photosynth is great for that. But, afterwards, you realize you missed dozens of angles and people can't see that really cool X you remember.
Openstreetview (Score:5, Informative)
Have a look at this project:
openstreetview.org.uk [openstreetview.org.uk]
The map data is from the Openstreetmap [openstreetmap.org] Project.
There's also a discussion going on about openstreetview in the talk mailing list of OSM. [openstreetmap.org]
Use 'New' Technology (Score:5, Funny)
There is this new fangled thing called a "video camera". It takes moving pictures. You can also record a "voice over" describing what you are seeing. I understand that there are even "video cameras" that shoot in "High Definition" and record to something called a "hard disk". Apparently you can even upload your moving pictures, or "videos", to some web site called "YouTube". Try it, you might like it.
Re: (Score:2)
Granted you can't easily record GPS on the fly into video but you can, as you noted, SAY where you are in the video. And the video itself certainly could be tagged with the general GPS coordinates. If you think about streetview it is actually a low res compromise bec
How about (Score:2)
Be careful (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
OpenViewProject (Score:5, Informative)
Why? (Score:2)
Lots of work, holidays are not supposed to be about work.
How about this idea instead - setup a blog, and each day post JUST ONE photo which tells a story about that one day. Annotate with where you are, who you are with, and why you thought this photo said it.
If any of my friends was doing that, you can bet I'd add it to my feed reader.
Holiday photos are about stories and experience, not places. Without you to tell the story, the photos no matter how beautiful, could be taken by anybody, it's meaningless.
Geotagging (Score:2)
1. Get a digital camera (A camcorder that will export
2. Get a fisheye lens or a 360 degree panoramic adapter.
3. Buy a GPS logger. Configure it to track during the same time that you are capturin
Free hosted virtual tours (Score:2)
Forgive the self-promotion, but CleVR [clevr.com] sounds like the sort of thing that would help. It has a free photo stitcher and easy hosting of the virtual tour. It supports hotspots, so you can click to move between locations.
Free solutions (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Pretty much any digital camera
2. Hugin [http://hugin.sourceforge.net/]
That's pretty much all you need. If you want better precision, a spherical tripod head helps a great deal. The panosaurus is the least expensive you will likely find.
Oh, plus
3. Lots of patience.
Have fun!
QuicktimVR is the way to go. (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember Myst? Well, you can make something like that right now.
What you need is:
- A lens or mirror that can make at least 180 images.
- A panorama creation program.
- A simple video camera.
- A Quicktime VR creation tool.
- A Java applet that can display Quicktime VR, including clickable zones.
Basically you make enough (overlapping) images of each place, to create a panorama. Then you make short (accelerated) movies of the walk between those places.
Now you create the panoramas, and with that tool, create clickable zones. In a house, you would make the doors, and perhaps the windows clickable. You know what I mean.
Then you can simply link the clickables to the different movies, contained in Flash files. And you make the end of the Flash files automatically load the URL of the resulting panorama.
If you really want to become fancy, you record loops of background audio, so people can heart them, and feel immersed.
Do not forget to describe the feeling of the senses that you can't show that well. Describe how it smells, how it feels on your skin. How hot/cold/windy it is, etc.
People are really good at building their own super-realistic fantasy out of this. I guarantee you, they will be impressed!
Videowarp---Mac Required (Score:2)
http://www.eyesee360.com/videowarp/ [eyesee360.com]
Content production requires a GOOD mac..
can be hand held or vehicle mounted....
actually not as expensive as the multicam rigs of immersive media
Gigapan (Score:2)
A summer camp I worked at was using software called gigapan. Basically a tripod with a servo on it and some custom software to take a shit load of ~4MP pictures and stitch them together to create an extremely high resolution panorama.
The CMU project page [cmu.edu] has more details, and the commercial arm of the project is here [gigapansystems.com].