Google Enhances Street View With User Photos 133
Google has launched a competitor or counterpart to Microsoft's Photosynth, which employs user-contributed photos of much-photographed sites to supplement the street-level view in an immersive way. Google's offering is called simply Navigate through User Photos, and unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash. This YouTube video (also embedded at the link above) offers a quick tour of the new feature, which can use photos uploaded to Panoramico, Flickr, and Picasa.
uh silverlight works in linux (Score:4, Informative)
Try Moonlight.
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight [mono-project.com]
Re:uh silverlight works in linux (Score:5, Informative)
Try Moonlight.
When stable Moonlight 1.0 was released as stable version about a year ago i tried it, only to be greeted by 'Silverlight 2.0 required, won't work with 1.0' on most non-demo pages.
This christmas someone posted me a photosynth link, i saw that Moonlight finally reached 2.0 stable release, so i again tried it, only to be greeted with 'Silverlight 3.0 required, won't work on 2.0' on photosynth and most other pages. Maybe someday in future there will be at least few day window when the silverlight app requirements match the available moonlight version, but it's not today.
Re:Why this beats Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
did you not read the part where it says that this requires Flash?
Re:uhg silverlight works in linux (Score:5, Informative)
Which makes the google demo look like something from 1996 in comparison. (Skip ahead to the 4:20 mark for some jaw-dropping live video overlaid on top of 3D interior shots of pike place market, generated from user pics.
The video you are referring to is a demo that required a guy with a camera to stream live for the presentation. Google's system actually works right now.
MS is superb at giving tech demos. They are even better at timing them to most strongly attack their opponents. But what they are awful at is delivering. Until MS gets enough cameras placed everywhere so that you can reasonably expect, even if primarily only in metropolitan areas, that they will have a camera view you can access, it's just going to be a cool gimmick that will have a camera on the Eiffel Tower, and one at Times Square, and maybe three in Seattle.
As of right now, they don't even have *one* set up anywhere.
It's fairly impressive, however, the way MS has this down to an art. They show this cool tech off, and everyone remembers how cool it is, and now existing products have to compete against an imaginary MS product that doesn't even exist and will most likely not exist any time soon.
They tried this with Surface when the iPhone debuted. That backfired, but even so, Suface, the demo, is damned cool. Surface, the reality, is a gimmick.