Bing Streetside: Flickr in 3D Space, 3D Transitions and Notable Potential

Microsoft have just just rolled out a new application that is currently in a tech preview phase that pulls photos from Flickr®, associates them with Bing Maps Streetside photos and then overlays them by stretching the photo to form fit where in the world it belongs. The new application called Streetside Photos is currently available in Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver (Canada) to view your Flickr photos in a whole new way. We gave it a spin this morning and captured the video below, it has huge potential to view historic photos and crowd source the latest imagery.

Note how the 3D transitions between scenes and how the photos become part of the panorama:



See the post over on the Microsoft site for full details on Streetside or jump direct to the Streetside Photos application.

London Aerial Tour - Panoramas taken from a Helicopter

Google may rule the roads with their panoramic images but the true panoramic artists have taken to the skies to show how it should be done. VR Web Design are currently the only company in the UK offering helicopter based HD aerial virtual tours fronted by known photographer Tom Mills the results are simply amazing.

The short clip below provides a preview:



Panoramic imagery on the web has come a long way since the early QuickTime VR days, take a look at the London Aerial Tour to see the current cutting edge.

Spheres: Panoramas and Step Inside Worlds

Ok so its not city related but the movie below is worth a post as we have a bit of a 'thing' on visualising spheres, they are really useful for creating movies of panoramas.

Spheres from Regis Hervagault on Vimeo.

Therefore, you could put a panoramic image on each of the spheres and create a series of 'worlds within worlds'. For those who may of missed our posts a few years back on panoramic spheres, the movie below details the first concept:

Panoramic London Churches - HD from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Building on this further with 'step inside spheres':

Worlds within Worlds: Using Panoramas for Sense of Location and Place from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Its a theme we may return to as they are quick and easy to create yet we think provide an interesting way to visualise the urban environment (?)

Edge of Sydney CBD: Stereographic Timelapse

We were about to try out a similar concept ourselves here at digital urban with an old 'one shot lens' and a HD video camera. Peter Murphy however has gone one step further with a dual Canon 5d with 10.5mm fisheye lens rig.

A image was taken every second resulting in the following movie:



The concept is similar to the Dizzy Rascal Bonkers video, if we do get round to using the one shot lens we will post up a few sample panoramas and a tutorial...

See Peters VR Weblog for more panoramic imagery - of particular note is his latest 'observation deck' panorama.

Google Street View Timelapse: The Raw Data

Google's Street View is without question the most ambitious panorama projects to date and the movie below provides a glimpse of the raw data captured. As the poster vipersniper32 states - four days, 3,642 GPS data points and one blatant violation of Google's Terms of Service:



So above is the raw data, if you have time and the patience you can create a timelapse from the actual final product:



The timelapse drives up Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis - its almost tempting to make one ourselves...

Black Rock City: Panoramic Video Loops

Shooting video in panoramic fashion at 640x480 with 10 second bursts for each section Zoyous has created a unique effect. Each scene is manually aligned creating 5000 pixel plus width video:



The changes in contrast and brightness along with the mixture of time throughout the scene makes for a panorama technique that would be really interesting to try out.

Other work by Zoyous can be seen at http://www.zoonbats.com/

Inside the K6 Phonebox: A 360 x 180 Degree View

The K6 Red Phonebox is a classic design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott who amongst other notable buildings also designed Battersea Power Station. The K6 "Jubilee" model pictured here was built to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V in 1935.

Click 'Load' to view the panorama, click and drag to look around and 'Open' to view fullscreen. It was a bit of a squeeze to get into the phonebox with all the panorama gear:


We used the term 'building' to describe the phonebox as the picurted K6 can be found at Byng Place in Bloomsbury London and is uniquely preserved as a Grade II Listed Building.

Note - apologies for the dismal 'Load' button, Flashificator is proving temperamental..