Putting one over Google maps
February 28, 2006 1:49 PM   Subscribe

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.
posted by rkent at 1:56 PM on February 28, 2006

looks neat, but it didn't finish me off as promised.
posted by jeffmik at 1:56 PM on February 28, 2006

Live Local + Tilt Shift = Randy's Donuts
posted by shoepal at 2:04 PM on February 28, 2006

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.
posted by JJ86 at 2:23 PM on February 28, 2006

Thank you JJ86 for the QDQ link. Madrid is much more exciting than San Fran!
posted by zonkout at 2:52 PM on February 28, 2006

That's pretty cool. I'm not entirely sure it;s working properly for me though.
posted by Artw at 3:14 PM on February 28, 2006

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!
posted by davejay at 3:18 PM on February 28, 2006

Anybody else failing to make it work on a mac?
posted by lucasks at 3:24 PM on February 28, 2006

And if Madrid isn't enough...PagesJaunes does most cities in Spain and France.
posted by peacay at 3:28 PM on February 28, 2006

What about New York? When, oh when, will the world finally start paying attention to New York?
posted by brain_drain at 3:50 PM on February 28, 2006

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.
posted by octothorpe at 4:01 PM on February 28, 2006

As soon as something blows up there again, brain_drain.
posted by redteam at 4:17 PM on February 28, 2006

Orgasmically?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:29 PM on February 28, 2006

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?
posted by scarabic at 4:42 PM on February 28, 2006

Forget the car. I can't wait for the first mash-ups of this with the latest FPS technology.
posted by mkultra at 4:50 PM on February 28, 2006

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.
posted by Popular Ethics at 5:12 PM on February 28, 2006

"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.
posted by marvin at 5:15 PM on February 28, 2006

TOO CREEPY. Just walked up my best friend's driveway - thank god I can't find my place yet.... jesus.
posted by tristeza at 6:04 PM on February 28, 2006

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?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:54 PM on February 28, 2006

Google pages
posted by cellphone at 7:49 PM on February 28, 2006

Wow marvin, I took the walk option and had a great time! Thank you.
posted by nickyskye at 9:22 PM on February 28, 2006

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.
posted by hincandenza at 12:37 AM on March 1, 2006

That really is Midtown Madness.
posted by Protocols of the Elders of Awesome at 12:55 AM on March 1, 2006

hincandenza, wow, just looked at my neighborhood with this link you gave, amazing!
posted by nickyskye at 8:54 AM on March 2, 2006