Google Streetview stop motion (video) | Hacker News Reader

Google Streetview stop motion (video)

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119 pointsrjim8617 comments

Google should add a 'continuous drive' mode.

I'm attempting this (360 video street-view) for Buenos Aires.

It is certainly feasible but there are many factors involved, starting from the right lens to dealing with the bureaucracy when trying to acquire permits.

Storage is an issue. A couple of city blocks means a few GB without compression. Since I'm shooting for high quality, I need a better solution than a measly notebook.

Of course, I'm just a mere mortal without an appropriate income for this stuff. Google could do this in their sleep.

Google's shown something like this off before. Video at http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/07/google-liquid-galaxy/

Peugeot currently has a site (Peugeot car promo) that does this: http://www.rczview.com/

Any other sites?

Wow, this is really awesome. Google should contact this person and use it as a long-form commercial for Street View. I think it sells it better than anything else I've ever seen. Incidentally, it fits almost perfectly to fill an entire commercial break.

This is a brilliant piece of beautiful and clever animation, there's no doubt about that.

But is it really stop motion street-view? I didn't think street-view's increments were that small. Not that it should take anything away from the final product if it wasn't, I'm just wondering.

On Vimeo he says that everything on the computer screen is animated without any replacements. So I'm guessing that yes, it's all just street view.

The first part looks like street-view, but the rest is clearly not - consider the overtaking cars in the tunnel...

Street view is built via a camera mounted on a truck driving on the street. I see no reason that the captured frames wouldn't include normal traffic flows.

That doesn't mean it's actually street view images.

You can clearly see that it's fluid video, not the smudgey, morphing transition used in street view.

Since its stop motion, you wouldn't see the morphing transition, they would wait for that to finish and then take the picture.

Not sure if that is what they actually did, but playing around with it a bit on my own it looks like you could get some decently fluid looking motion by taking screenshots of each "frame" that street view provides.

Have you actually used street view? I have never seen a street with less than 5-20 meters between each position.

According to a quick calculation that would give you a minimum apparent speed of 170 mph. (15 f/s * 5 m/f * 3600 s/h / 1600 mph/m/s)

It's not stop motion Street View except for 5th Ave, but it's stop-motion outside of the computer screen. I don't think he put those pots on a rail.

Beautiful video but IMO it has not its place on HN.

Right. Unless there is some more information like the making of, it would just make HN another Reddit.

Also, why link to some blogspam when the more informative Vimeo link is right there.

From the description of the video on Vimeo, here are some making-of pictures: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.293407880691317.735...

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