Show HN: Street View Simple – Explore Street View Data in a Browser
callumprentice.github.io
callumprentice.github.io
You can see it is very basic 90deg angle geometry, instead of actual pointclouds. Still pretty cool! https://imgur.com/a/EgC0RbN
Someone used it years ago to make a neat visualization where they rendered the Street View imagery as normal and then used the same 3D data to overlay foliage and create an apocalyptic environment. Seems to be gone now but there are some articles about it like this one: https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/03/epic-google-street-view...
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?
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.
I find your project fascinating, thank you for sharing it!
Having thought about it some more, I think this is a consequence of the reduction of surface area hit by the LIDAR rays, as the square of it's distance. Basically, the rays are cast in a spherical distribution (which has a surface area of 4pir^2). So the further out you go, the rays "capture" less of the environment, and you get the sort of sparse pixels at a distance.
So those circles are just reductions in pixel density that are proportional to linear distance from the center of the LIDAR sphere. You can kind of see how depending on the distance to the building walls, the surrounding 'halo' of circular pixel density increases or decreases.
Mapillary: https://www.mapillary.com/
OpenStreetCam: https://openstreetcam.org/
Super cool to see this depth data IRL.
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?
Does anyone know how this is done?
all relevant addons were also disabled.
If it works in Firefox it usually works in all modern browsers, so even without doing extensive cross browser testing I know it will just work.
I also catch most cross browser bugs from people who use Chrome.