
The Pancake: A Less Annoying Way To Move Through Google Street View - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/04/introducing-the-pancake-a-less-annoying-way-to-move-through-google-street-view/
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lliiffee
The writeup doesn't emphasize that they actually had to do some rough 3d
reconstruction to allow you to move to the buildings like that. This was a
mixture of lazer and stereo vision.

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tlrobinson
I wondered what they were going to do with the LIDAR sensors on the Street
View vehicles.

Maybe they didn't even know what they would do with it, but decided it was
better to throw LIDAR in from the beginning and figure out what to do with it
later, rather than having to drive every street in the world twice.

(Or maybe they used that data for the 3D models of buildings in Google Maps
and Google Earth?)

Anyone know if the cars have any other sensors that haven't been utilized yet?
I'm guessing they also recorded WiFi and possibly cell tower locations for
geolocation.

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lallysingh
Huh, I assumed it was just fairly-smart geometry estimation. How else could
they compensate for the LIDAR hitting cars & people?

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calambrac
They've made multiple passes by now, you would assume there aren't always
going to be cars or people in the way. There could easily be some data
scrubbing smarts in there, too, like knowing that a 3 story building doesn't
suddenly jut out to the road in its lowest six feet (notice, for instance, in
Brooklyn, the stoops aren't considered part of the building surface).

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dantheman
It's amazing how much small little tweaks to the ui significantly improve the
experience of an application. Implementing this was probably quite difficult,
but the simple ui works so well.

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jsonscripter
I'm not used to double-clicking on the internet, so it took a bit getting used
to. Very nifty, though.

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bmelton
Y'know, I was thinking "right on", until I realized that I'm very used to
double-clicking Google maps as a zoom shortcut. So I guess it conforms to the
site's general usability theme.

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spohlenz
Love it. Improves navigating city streets beautifully. More open areas see an
improvement too but not by as large a margin.

One feature I'd still love to see is to control the zoom level with the mouse
wheel. Especially with the Pancake, I found myself accidentally zooming in,
and having to search for the tiny zoom out button.

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chime
It works surprisingly well. Makes you wonder why nobody thought of it all this
time. Even if the 3D building stuff didn't exist, the pancake for moving in 2D
is very useful.

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dtf
Makes you wonder, but then again this sounds like just the kind of thing that
some 10 year old user interface patent will suddenly turn up on... snapped up
by an IP troll during the fire-sale of some long-dead CAD company.

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LogicHoleFlaw
3D games have been doing this sort of UI for ages. Still, the 3D
reconstruction work being applied to real-life images is quite impressive.

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pchristensen
Love it!! I've been using Live (I mean Bing) maps lately because of the bird's
eye view. This new and improved Street View might get me back to Google
Maps/Streetview.

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tlrobinson
The bird's eye view in Live/Bing maps is kind of scary. I can practically see
in the window of my old apartment.

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calambrac
This is fantastic. Now they need an option to disable the big yellow line and
arrows.

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cousin_it
I can't understand how they animate the transition in Flash. Is it 3D in low-
res?

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weegee
I have to say that I love using Google Maps to visit different cities. I went
to London last fall and was able to see some streets I walked down as well as
others that I wanted to walk down but didn't. I can only imagine the street
view images will slowly be taken down, until rather than having a nearly
continuous street we will have photos here and there and blackness in between.
Interesting that all the street view photos have to be re-done in Japan with
the camera 18 inches lower to preserve peoples privacy behind residential
walls. Wonder if that will be done in the rest of the world. Anyway, it's a
really great time waster. Thanks Googlites!

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keltecp11
Definitely an amazing upgrade.

