The user interface is awful.
BTW there appears to be an XBox 360 controller resting on the dashboard :)
-PK |
The idea is great. You can see this being the future of mapping. I imagine it would work better perhaps in a client like Google Earth rather than a browser based app. But you know AJAX these days they'll put it in the browser. It is mad to have spent any time at all on the dashboard etc. because they only serve to obscure the photos. What is the point of the race/sports car and walking. Just show me the photos!
Very jerky at the moment too but again idea is good. Anyone else noticed you can drive over buildings? |
I agree, this calls for a standalone app., or even better, to be integrated into a vehicle's GPS. Very neat way to visualize directions. Kudos to MS for thinking outside the box on this one IMHO. |
Yes the virutal earth team (Jay Nanduri , Brad Snow, Chandu Thota, Eyal Ofek, Rick Welsh) have thought outside the box on this one.!! However, this is just a poc in the making. It takes over 10milion images for just one city. So the scalarability is what is going to matter!!
However,the technology is. Still not linked into atlas (nikhil kothari) and into areo glass. If this meshmash together the .live will really become live.com!!
All in all an interesting set of developments taking into consideration that steve jobs is also be delivering a new product @ 3pm pdt!! |
While it is an interesting twist, this is not 100% original. It was really amazon's a9 that first broke ground with their street-level maps, now called Blockview.
http://maps.a9.com |
yeah thanks Niraj, your correct!! :)-
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Washington State already has something similar (but less fancy) for touring the State Routes:
http://srview.wsdot.wa.gov/home.htm |
I couldn't even figure it out. They only have two small sections of two cities... Why not just fly overhead at an extreme angle and photograph the storefronts that way? |
Stephen, because you would have to really close to the ground and that's not feasible in a large city (with tall buildings). But Google (and probably MSN, etc.) are working on combining such aerial imagery with ground imagery to reconstruct cities in 3D. It would be a matter of adding images to the 3D models already present in Google Earth. |
funny fight bewtween google earth and virtual earth – have fun :)-
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Google+Earth&word2=MSN+Virtual+Earth |
It is buggy at intersections, but still pretty cool.
If you go to the Experience Music Project, and look at the red part, there is a highly reflective window, so you can see the van taking the photographs. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to provide direct links.
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=166518
^ Has an interview with the team that made Streetlevel. At about 18 minutes into the video, they are discussing the URL. The interviewer thinks it's to long, so at 18:40, he suggests using Google to find it. He got quite a reaction out of that :-)
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