When I first saw Google Street View, Google’s panoramic addition to Google Maps, I was amazed, but wanted more. Seeing what they had done was inspiring, but I wanted to be able to annotate parts of the panoramas, to build my own services around it, and to take pictures of the places Google didn’t go. Instead of creating panoramas of asphalt, I waned to capture places with people, create interactive panoramas of events, trails, beaches, ice skating rinks, the places where people actually go. The OpenView Project is just this, a way for anyone to create interactive panoramas, and share them to create a new way to view the world.
Google Street View is great, it’s a way to be able to virtually navigate a city from the perspective of a car. It’s like a picture, but you can spin the view around 360 degrees, zoom in, and then “drive” down the street and do it all over again in a different place. When it was first released, I wanted to be a part of it, I wanted to make it better. So I did what any curious programmer would do – I dissected it.
I looked at the net traffic, figured out the unofficial API with the help of Mikel Maron, and wrote a script to walk their data. I didn’t store anything other than the the unique IDs for each location, but nevertheless I got an email from Google’s legal department politely telling me to remove my python script from my website. Mikel had made a program a few years prior to assemble giant posters of Google Map tiles, so I wasn’t surprised, but a little sad that they would so quickly ask me to put an end to my exploration. It wasn’t until earlier this year that they finally opened up the API to the public.
The idea of creating interactive panoramas still stuck with me. I loved what Google had done, but the more I used it, the more I realized the place was less important than the people. If you look at any of the Google Street View sightseeing sites, you will see one common theme – people. Unfortunately in our modern society, streets aren’t the dominant place where people go. People go to the beach, they go to the mall, they go to the park, they go to concerts, basically everywhere Google can’t drive their Google Street View Van. This idea still stuck with me, and if there’s anything I’ve learned in the 27 years I’ve been alive, it’s that being part of something is far more exciting than just being a spectator.
So instead of trying to find loopholes and play by Google’s rules, I am beginning to explore this different idea. I call it The OpenView Project, and you can be a part of it. Jay Longson (my brother), Brent Heyning, and I are building panoramic camera ontop of a recumbent tricycle, we’ll be able to cover a huge amount of distance, and get the chance to create interactive panoramas of bike trails, boardwalks, farmers markets, concerts, and in just a few weeks, the Burning Man art festival. Instead of just using Google Street View as a spectator, we’ll be building a creative commons of snapshots in time of places all over the world. We’ll be publishing instructions to show you how to do it too, and building an open source service to act as a clearing house for the data, much like Open Street Map allows people to upload geographic information about the world to a central place for all to share.
If you want to help, contact me at tomlong@gmail.com. We’re of course tight on money, so donations always help, and when we return from the playa we will begin building the engine to serve up all these panoramas. Please, let me know what you think, and what your ideas have been. Together, we can do something truly amazing.
Tom Longson
Changes:
Updated 8/2/08 to add Brent Heyning to the list of contributors and to remove references to our multi-cam pano approach.
