Comments on: Putting one over Google maps

Putting one over Google maps

marvin — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 13:49:09 -0800

Orgasmically merges street level imagery with satellite to create virtual streetwalks (For Seattle or San Francisco anyway)

By: rkent

rkent — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 13:56:17 -0800

Damn it! It won't let me turn the wrong way down the one-way streets. Wait... it kind of will, for like half a block, then the camera starts turning back around forward. Hee.

By: jeffmik

jeffmik — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 13:56:22 -0800

looks neat, but it didn't finish me off as promised.

By: shoepal

shoepal — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:04:53 -0800

Live Local + Tilt Shift = Randy's Donuts

By: JJ86

JJ86 — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:23:00 -0800

It was pretty cool, I was driving sideways down Virginia Street. Too bad it doesn't have sound so I can hear the screams of the pedestrians. Good concept to see the streets though. QDQ in Spain has a similarly great system of providing streetside images of any address you type in.

By: zonkout

zonkout — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:52:18 -0800

Thank you JJ86 for the QDQ link. Madrid is much more exciting than San Fran!

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:14:37 -0800

That's pretty cool. I'm not entirely sure it;s working properly for me though.

By: davejay

davejay — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:18:55 -0800

They've got a lot of work to do on moving the car around (I was disappointed every time I couldn't see the inside of a parking lot; either make me stick to the roads, or show me the inside of buildings!) but it's the next step. I was thinking what the step beyond would be; perhaps you upload your picture into it, and you can visualize yourself walking in front of the camera? Instant tourist photos!

By: lucasks

lucasks — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:24:28 -0800

Anybody else failing to make it work on a mac?

By: peacay

peacay — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:28:05 -0800

And if Madrid isn't enough...PagesJaunes does most cities in Spain and France.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:50:32 -0800

What about New York? When, oh when, will the world finally start paying attention to New York?

By: octothorpe

octothorpe — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:01:49 -0800

I can't seem to get it to do anything useful. I can sort of move the car around randomly with the mouse but the arrow keys down do anything. The whole thing is a little too cute anyway even if it did work.

By: redteam

redteam — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:17:40 -0800

As soon as something blows up there again, brain_drain.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:29:24 -0800

Orgasmically?

By: scarabic

scarabic — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:42:43 -0800

I checked this out from Waxy and had a momentary "wow" experience, but it quickly faded. The map interface is really crippled. It has sattelie/map/hybrid, but no zoom (makes it hard to navigate to the area you want to explore). And we'll ignore the 2 city scope for now. But even ignoring that, the streetview data is missing too much of the time. This is kind of to be expected, since it's the main challenge of such a thing. But until a product like this SURPASSES expectations, it'll just be a novelty. So without robust mapping or an impressive photobank, what do you have? You have a UI. And let's talk about that UI. It's got this ridiculous racecar motif with graphics that look like they were built by 8 years olds in MS Paint. And speaking of Windows, they try to tile the different perspectives across the car's windshield as if they somehow form a continuous view. They don't, due to perspective (not even close) so this becomes more jarring than useful. Interesting demo. You can't have super-high expectations of demos. But when's the last time Google let something so limp see the light of day - even as a demo? M$ is absolutely desperate to do something cool. Their products are so wooden they can't stand themselves anymore. And who can blame them?

By: mkultra

mkultra — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:50:44 -0800

Forget the car. I can't wait for the first mash-ups of this with the latest FPS technology.

By: Popular Ethics

Popular Ethics — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 17:12:12 -0800

Hmm, I can only look in the four cardinal directions? That's no fun. I'd rather see scrollable panoramas, like this QTVR tour of downtown Vancouver BC.

By: marvin

marvin — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 17:15:49 -0800

"orgasmic" ...well I was pretty excited when I saw it at lunchtime, especially as I've lived in both cities. But yeah, it's pretty clunky, although as a glimpse of what's to come, it's pretty exciting.

By: tristeza

tristeza — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:04:46 -0800

TOO CREEPY. Just walked up my best friend's driveway - thank god I can't find my place yet.... jesus.

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:54:36 -0800

But when's the last time Google let something so limp see the light of day - even as a demo? Google video? Google reader? Google Blogsearch? Google pack?

By: cellphone

cellphone — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 19:49:23 -0800

Google pages

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:22:30 -0800

Wow marvin, I took the walk option and had a great time! Thank you.

By: hincandenza

hincandenza — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:37:18 -0800

scarabic: The map interface is really crippled. It has sattelie/map/hybrid, but no zoom (makes it hard to navigate to the area you want to explore). And we'll ignore the 2 city scope for now.

While I won't dispute that this preview is... weird, you can most certainly zoom! Just scroll in/out using your mouse wheel. The regular non-preview Windows Live Local works far better than this quirky little beta thing, and is a truly fantastic interface and map system. I honestly believe it's considerably better than Google's, including permalinks that can use pushpins and saved searches. Seriously: try this link, to see a couple blocks of my neighborhood, and tell me that's not kicking the pants off Google! :) Full disclosure: I'm not entirely unbiased in my rampant boosterism. While I never worked on virtual earth, this site is now hosted by my old team actually- or rather, the MSN Search team has apparently inhaled the virtual earth team since shortly after I left. It makes sense; any reasonable hosting of a map site like Google Maps or MSN Virtual Earth has the same problems to solve as Google or MSN or Yahoo's search engine: massive amounts of data stored and updated with a need to distribute it smoothly across N servers evenly so as to balance capacity and scale out easily as data and usage grows. N servers where N is a "large number", namely 4 or more digits, requires highly automated and self-repairing commodity computing clusters.

By: Protocols of the Elders of Awesome

Protocols of the Elders of Awesome — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:55:23 -0800

That really is Midtown Madness.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 08:54:31 -0800

hincandenza, wow, just looked at my neighborhood with this link you gave, amazing!