Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
ANDRES FERRATE: Hello and welcome to another Google Maps
API screencast. My name is Andres Ferrate.
I'm with Google Maps developer relations.
And today I'm going to talk about the Street View Service
in our Maps API.
Chances are pretty good that you've heard
about Street View.
When you go to maps.google.com, of course,
everybody's heard of this site.
You can zoom into any particular part of the world.
And if we have Street View imagery available, you can
hover the pegman.
This gives you an idea of where there
are Street View images.
And once you drop the pegman, you actually get this really
nice immersive experience where you can navigate around
and pan around and get an idea for what things look like at
street view.
Well, guess what?
We have a Street View API as part of the Maps API.
So with the Street View Service, as we call it, you
can take the Street View imagery that we have, and you
can integrate it into your web app.
But there's more.
You can actually take the Street View service, and you
can include custom imagery.
So what you can do is take your camera, say, for example,
my Galaxy Nexus, or you can take a digital camera, say,
something like this, or you can take something like--
well, yeah, I'm not so sure that this is going to work.
But anyway, you're going to go out there and you're doing to
take a whole bunch of photos, you need to take a 360 degree
view of the world around you.
Once you've got your photos, you're going to do what's
called image stitching.
I suggest you go to Wikipedia and
search for image stitching.
You'll get a list of a whole bunch of
software that's out there.
Of course, you can also go to Android Market or some other
place to get some apps for your mobile device.
Or you can go out there and search on the web on your
preferred search engine and find existing images.
Now here is a pro tip.
Whenever you are stitching your image together or your
images together, you want to make sure that you are
projecting them in a equirectangular projection.
Now, once you've got all your images, you're going to stitch
it and tailor it.
It's going to look something like this.
These are some photos I took while I was in Argentina.
And here is the end result.
You get a nice custom street view panorama.
In this case, this is the plaza in downtown Buenos Aires
in Argentina where I was visiting not too long ago.
This is an equivalent of the immersive experience you get
with Google's stock imagery.
But there's more.
You can actually go out there and find some other stuff,
say, oh, I don't know, if NASA has some equirectangular
images available for Mars, you can actually take these and
integrate them into the StreetView Service.
So you get a custom panorama of say the Mars Rover on the
surface of Mars.
And, or course, you can pan around.
And you can zoom in and zoom out the same way that you do
with Street View.
You can also modify it so that you get the proof that you had
a friend visit Mars, as well.
That's it.
Here is the Google short link.
Check it out.
Let us know what you think.