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Show HN: Street View Simple – Explore Street View Data in a Browser
- pj_mukh 6y agoThis is very cool! I'm thinking the depth data that is captured is of higher resolution. Is that true? Was this limited by the API? Or a limitation of the browser? Super cool to see this depth data IRL.
- callumprentice 6y agoThank you! As far as I know (it's undocumented) the only source of depth data is very low resolution. The image data (where the color of each point comes from) is much, much higher - shame they're not on par with each other.
- moron4hire 6y agoI've been very interested in getting access to the depth data for a VR project I'm working on. Is this something you could talk more about, perhaps over email (in my profile)?
- callumprentice 6y agoYes of course - email sent - I spoke too soon - message was blocked for unspecified reasons. My email is my profile if you'd like to start a conversation.
- kevinali3 6y agoIs there any software (preferably open source) that can be used to build one's own street views for areas/countries that are not covered by Google?
- callumprentice 6y agoI believe you can publish your own images and have them available via Google Maps but I've never done it. This might be a decent starting point: https://www.google.com/streetview/contributors/ https://www.google.com/streetview/contributors/
- jefft255 6y agoAny photogrammetry software will do the trick. A free one has been shared here recently: https://alicevision.org/ https://alicevision.org/ .
- netsharc 6y agoI've seen a project by OpenStreetMap to upload dashcam images, and a quick search gave me this: https://openstreetcam.org https://openstreetcam.org
- windthrown 6y agoIt started as "OpenStreetView", changed names due to Google, and has had a few different owners but is a continuation of the original project you saw.
- windthrown 6y agoThe software is not open-source but both Mapillary and OpenStreetCam have very permissive licenses. I contribute to and use both services to improve OpenStreetMap. Mapillary: https://www.mapillary.com/ https://www.mapillary.com/ OpenStreetCam: https://openstreetcam.org/ https://openstreetcam.org/
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoOpenStreetCam itself isn’t quite closed-source: it is on Github. But the app was built on top of Facebook tools, which many people will not want on their phones. See the notorious outstanding Github issue [0]. At least OSC’s hard dependency on Google Play Services appears to have been removed, though – last time I looked into installing Mapillary, it still would not run on a bare Android like LineageOS. [0] https://github.com/openstreetcam/android/issues/8 https://github.com/openstreetcam/android/issues/8
- Raphaellll 6y agoYou can highly customize the Google Maps javascript service to load and connect you custom panoramas hosted on your own server.
- jefft255 6y agoThat's doesn't properly look like lidar data to me; at least it wouldn't be lidar that is mounted right on the street view car. Maybe they use aerial lidar somehow? Or maybe the resolution is purposefully poor?
- sdan 6y agoYeah, this definitely doesn't look like lidar data... unless its really low quality. The buildings show spatial depth, but the cars and pedestrians are pretty much all in a circle (they have no depth).
- callumprentice 6y agoInteresting - I've seen it touted as LiDAR data but since it's all a bit unofficial, I guess it could be anything. I'll see if I can dig up any old articles about it - it's been there for quite some time.
- mthoms 6y agoI don't know much about lidar but.. is it possible Google have done this intentionally with some sort of algorithm? After all, pedestrians and vehicles are just "noise" in the context of mapping/visualising streets.
- accurrent 6y agoI think they have removed the cars from the lidar on purpose as there would be privacy issues if the cars were shown. Same would apply for pedestrians and shop facades.
- pantelisk 6y agoIt is not proper pointclouds, but it is the data used by Street view to highlight if you are looking at a wall, or at a street. It is also used for transitions between one scene to another. You can see it is very basic 90deg angle geometry, instead of actual pointclouds. Still pretty cool! https://imgur.com/a/EgC0RbN https://imgur.com/a/EgC0RbN
- 6y ago
- saeranv 6y agoThis seems really cool, but I don't quite understand what I'm looking at. Is this a processed version of the LIDAR data for the environment? Also why do the "pixels" get less dense at the edges of the view? I.e as you rotate, the pixels that were previously at the center of the screen get more sparse as they reach the edges of your view? My intuition is that if you sample points on a hemisphere equally (a difficult task in of itself), then you shouldn't get this kind of pixelation. So is there something going on here with either the orientation of the squares, or sampling that causes the density/exposure to fall-off with cosine of the vector looking ahead and vector to the side?
- callumprentice 6y agoYep - there is way to grab the depth data from each Street View pano along with the image data. I plot each point 3D space and grab the corresponding color from the image. The separation is uneven - depends on what the the depth camera sees I guess - many of the points are marked as off at infinity.
- saeranv 6y agoInteresting, so it's the data they provide that is sparse. If you expand the view to full screen, and stare straight-on at the wall, you can clearly see the 'sparse' pixels form a circle around the camera on the ground and at the sky. I don't really know how LIDAR works, so I don't know if it's something intrinsic to the process, or a decision made by the engineers.
- callumprentice 6y agoYah, I've noticed that too - I wondered if it was an. artifact of the way I render the points but since the building look mostly right, I figured that was the way it is.
- saeranv 6y agoThat's a possibility. Are you rotating your squares in just the xy plane, or also along the "pitch"? I find your project fascinating, thank you for sharing it!
- thepete2 6y agoDoes not work in firefox...
- callumprentice 6y agoOh no! I don't think there is a reason it won't - I'll grab Firefox and see if I can fix it now.
- callumprentice 6y agoI just grabbed the latest version for macOS (77.0) and it works okay there? Which platform are you seeing it fail on?
- ciarannolan 6y agoWorks for me on the latest versions of MacOS and Firefox :)
- callumprentice 6y agoThanks!
- MayeulC 6y agoWorks here on Arch Linux, Firefox 76.0.1 (yeah, I need to upgrade).
- thepete2 6y ago68.8.0esr (64-bit)
- callumprentice 6y agoI would have guessed that’s new enough. Any error messages I. The console?
- 6y ago
- saeranv 6y agoLooking at this makes me wonder how Google combines the point data to generate clean polygons. I.e when I hover my mouse over a wall in Street View, it identifies correctly the entire connected plane. Does anyone know how this is done?
- callumprentice 6y agoI'd like to know that too - all kinds of neat things are possible when you have polygons vs points.
- 00deadbeef 6y agoI’ve got no idea what this is. The text on the page is truncated in Safari on iOS so I assume there are some explanatory notes I can’t see?
- raimue 6y agoEven with the full text I do not understand what I am seeing. The comparison to previous projects did not help because I do not know them either. It appears to be a different rendering of the Street View data that will be loaded from Google servers. What is the purpose of this site? Just to show how Street View works internally?