Thursday, June 19, 2014

Satellite Video Mapping - Part Two


Mapbox have created a stunning demo of a video of Earth taken from satellite embedded within an interactive map.

Back in March Mapbox released a video of a map containing video captured by Skybox's SkySat-1. In the Mapbox video you can see that the SkySat-1 video is embedded on a map so that the user can zoom and pan into the video as you can with any interactive slippy map.

Of course I wanted to try and see if this was possible using the Google Maps API. My first crude (and rubbish) attempt to try mapping Skybox's video of the Burj Khalifa was Satview. This map simply places a div element containing the video over the map. So if you pan the map the video won't move with the map.

Mapbox's new map actually uses an overlay to embed the video on the map so that it scales and moves as you zoom and pan the map. Video in Mapbox shows satellite imagery of Maryland, shot from space in January, on top of the static Mapbox satellite imagery. Not only can you pan and zoom into the video on the map you can rotate it as well.

Now that's impressive!

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