DIY Google Street View Project? 106
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.
Re:a small collection of tools (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft Photosynth (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 overlapped layers, so I could get views from down into the pool, to up into the sky.
The result? Some overlapping frames that they were able to stitch together. There were a whole lot of orphaned pictures too.
I tried to show it to someone, and the cells were pathetically slow to turn into full resolution. It wasn't a connection or a computer problem on their end. Eventually, they would, but it was far from a good panorama.
I wanted to do a photosynth of the SR71 at the Smithsonian's new museum at Dulles. That turned out poorly, even with great overlapping photos. Here's the photosynth [photosynth.net].
I did have one turn out well. Here's the photosynth [photosynth.net]. I shot it from a hotel in Los Angeles, where I had a corner suite in a downtown hotel on a fairly high floor. A coworker had another corner room on the same floor, so I had maybe a 280 degree view. From the window, I shot a skyline layer, a mid-layer, and a street layer. I also followed taller buildings up. I then shot another set of pictures standing back in the room. It was kind of neat that you could pan through, and watch the walls and floors disappear sometimes.
Microsoft Photosynth is far from prime time. Don't get your hopes up. In their original advertising, it was said to merge your photos with other people's photos, to get a better view of a setting. That simply doesn't happen. It fails to recognize a lot of matching photos in the same set. They may get it better, or they may drop it. Either way, I wouldn't hope for it to do something nice, like turn a set of photos from a street into a navigable streetview like Google Maps Streetview.
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!
Re:I worked on this for a while.... (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 tried anything yet on your street?