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Google street-view meets new apartment

Mara and I just moved into the Low­er Haight ear­li­er this month, and Google just released a new Maps fea­ture — Street View — that has a pic­ture of our place. If I weren't writ­ing about this, I'd be speech­less. Wow.

Our new place on FillmoreOur place is the yel­low two-sto­ry walk-up that is bustin out of the top of the frame. I love that it was cap­tured on one of those semi-sun­ny days where lit­tle wisps of fog drift through. So nice to not live in the fog belt. Inci­den­tal­ly, here's the Chronicle's fog fore­cast. Doesn't look good.

Street Lev­el seems like use­ful func­tion­al­i­ty, esp. for fan­cy mobile devices, which I don't have. The con­trols are pret­ty straight­for­ward and easy to use on a desk­top, but I won­der about the ease with which one could nav­i­gate up and down the streets with those tee­ny arrows on a Palm or Black­ber­ry. This is real­ly nit­picky, but I think it would be effec­tive to intro­duce more map nav­i­ga­tion into the image, i.e. skip­ping to the next inter­sec­tion, return­ing to the orig­i­nal des­ti­na­tion, etc. Future-wise, it would be awe­some to be able to do stuff with the images — eas­i­ly insert them into oth­er things, string them togeth­er in con­nec­tion with direc­tions, etc. What I want to know is: How the heck did they do it? Thx, kot­tke.

One reply on “Google street-view meets new apartment”

Basi­cal­ly, there is a fleet of vehi­cles that roam around the streets of major cities and rur­al ares that have spher­i­cal cam­era pil­lars mount­ed upon them. Thay dri­ve up and down steets in a grid-like fash­ion. The cam­eras take pic­tures in set time inter­vals i.e. every 2.7 sec­onds OR thay have pre-pro­grammed dis­tance inter­vals for the cam­era shots i.e. they take a pic­ture every 10 feet or every 2 meters. In this case, the vehicle's odome­ter relays the per­ti­nent data to the rooftop pho­tog­ra­phy hub or the rooftop cam­era hub. SOme of the cam­era cars also have a built in SICK laser, which in essense dig­i­tal­izes the fore­ground for elec­tron­ic com­pu­ta­tion­al ren­der­ing (ECR) sup­port. Theres your answer, honey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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