Tuesday, February 23, 2010

You Tube and Street View

Street View with Video Embedded
Recently at TED Blaise Aguera y Arcas stunned the crowd with a demo of a video playing in Bing Maps version of Street View. You can see the demo in action in the video below.



This got me thinking that this should be possible in Google Maps Street View. I knocked up this rather lame example showing a YouTube video embedded in Street View in under an hour today. This is just a demo to show what could be possible although it isn't the greatest example.

The demo would look better if I used the chromeless YouTube player (but I couldn't work out how to implement it) Now chromeless! The demo would also look better if the video played more in synch with the Street View. This shouldn't be too difficult as it would just involve synchronising the Street View yaw with the time in the video.

The demo would also work better if the video used was shot from exactly the same spot from where the Street View was taken. However despite it being a rather poor example I think it shows what could be possible.

Feel free to use the code if you think you can develop this further.

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2 comments:

Don Crowley said...

s far as I can remember Google has a patent now to string street view photos into a video like animation which you could use from your smart phone to follow direction in a town or city. This functionality is not available yet but I am expecting it to appear sometime :) The TED demo was very cool and I am very glad to see MS doing cool stuff like this.

Keir Clarke said...

Microsoft are working on something very similar - video driving directions.

There was a video demo of it floating around at the end of last year but I can't remember where I saw it.