Friday, July 27, 2012

The Olympics on Street View


The Olympic Stadium & the Orbit

Google Maps has added Street View imagery of the Olympics Park and some of the other stadiums being used for the 2012 London Olympics.


The Velodrome (affectionately known as the Pringle) 

The imagery was taken during the park's construction so the park doesn't look quite as attractive in Street View as it does now that it is completed, but nevertheless this new imagery does allow you to take a virtual walk around the location of this year's Olympics.


Wembley Stadium

Various other locations around London are also hosting Olympics events. One of the most attractive is Horse Guards Parade, which is the venue for the beach volleyball.


Horse Guards Parade (Beach Volleyball)

In the spirit of Olympic fair play I also have to give a shout out to Bing Maps, whose Bird's Eye view imagery of the Olympics Park is pretty stunning.

This shot of the stadium shows that a map of the river Thames has been created on the stadium pitch, providing a little clue as to what we can expect in tonight's opening ceremony.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Browsing through London and with the "Public transport" layer can be seen some estrange white marks above many tube and train stations: http://i.imgur.com/vgKH4.jpg. Any idea if this is an error or has some meaning?

Keir Clarke said...

Were you using MapsGL? I've been seeing some strange bugs in the last week using the WebsGL option for Google Maps in Chrome.

Anonymous said...

Great stuff... i assume these are recent pictures and development... and you've used Google Maps API v2 (Flash) and yet it is deprecated and will be removed sometime next year.

My question is, why didn't you use Google Maps API v3 which uses html5... is there a reason behind this?

Keir Clarke said...

@anonymous - These aren't using the maps API. These are on the main Google Maps website. So unless you are using MapsGL in Chrome street view still uses Flash in Google Maps.

Anonymous said...

@Keir Clarke: reason i ask is because i'm trying to buid an app using custom street view for indoor shop... i'd like this app to be used both in desktop and mobile, i'm using google api v3 which uses html5 only (correct me if i'm wrong)... but i find it a bit lagging and poor performance especially in full screen... any advice/recommendation on building indoors app with tagging possibly?

Keir Clarke said...

You are right that the Maps API uses HTML5 for Street View.

If you are using custom Street Views I guess some lagging might be from your servers pushing the images.

I think the best thing to do with custom Street Views is to create tiles with your images.

Have you checked out this tutorial - http://googlemaps.googlermania.com/google_maps_api_v3/en/custom_streetview/

As to tagging I think you would need to use the canvaslayer library. https://code.google.com/p/google-maps-utility-library-v3/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Fcanvaslayer

In a Google Maps Developers Office Hours Live video last week they said it is possible to use it with Street View but I haven't worked out how to do it yet myself. You could post a question to Stack Overflow.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-maps