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Comment by apunic | Hacker News Reader

Just because it's from Google it must be special?

Don't want to sound too negative but wondering if Trek would get any attention if done by some startup.

If some startup comes along and provides stunning zoom-able StreetView pictures of some no-name street in Tel-Aviv and two clicks later it can show you the red light district in Bangkok, all for free and all taken in 2013, I think a lot of people would give that startup its due.

I'm not sure you appreciate the engineering infrastructure at work here. This isn't special because Google is doing it, it's special because it's really hard to do. How would you go about attempting this project as effectively as Google with the resources of a typical startup company?

Crawl the web for images, use the GPS EXIF data to find clusters, and use image processing to stitch together 3D environments from the photos.

It would not be as good as streetview though.

Creative...but I don't think it would have the same fluidity to Google's Trek. The images wouldn't be as up to date or "real time" as they could be because you'd be caching images that are potentially several days or weeks old.

And if you scripted a time limit for images, e.g. only within a few hours, you'd heavily limit the amount of usable images you had.

With "agents in the field" Google could potentially update its feeds whenever and as often as it needed. The difference would be having an in-house image-generating infrastructure or...well...tag-searching Instagram.

Microsoft did this, effectively. Someone who remembers the project can provide a link to the demo/talks (TED, if I recall) hopefully.

edit: believe it was related to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth

EDIT: Looks like I'm behind the times. Google already did this:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669688/googles-photo-tours-sugg...

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/04/visit-global-land...

Current top comment in this thread is exactly about a company doing it since 2004 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6210281 ). I'd never heard of them before; if anything, this is free publicity for them. Tide raising all boats etc etc.

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