Saturday, February 12, 2011

Cruising Dubai with Video Street View

You may recall the recent post about MapCrunch, an application that generates random images from Google’s immense street view archives.



Now there’s another app that shows the view from the road between any two points. “Video Street View” started off this month with databases covering Dubai, Saïgon and Hanoï. Users pick routes and watch an immersive video that lets them pan and tilt for a 360 degree view.

Project manager, Jan-Mathieu Donnier is talking about adding data for pedestrian routes such as museum interiors.

VideoStreetView.com

4 comments:

Mark Segal said...

Have you seen Google Art Project? You can browse the interiors of many museums around the world. It has a lot of other features like zooming in on fine detail or finding more work by the same artist.

James Gurney said...

Mark, yes, it's phenomenal. I did a post about it about a year ago when they were just starting out at the Prado:
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/01/googles-prado-project.html

My Pen Name said...

@mark, yes, google art project is great. I wonder though someday i'd like to hear James and other artists here offer their opinion on the value of a real painting vs a photo of one.
Sometimes the effects are easy to convey - the size of a large painting, or the impasto that gives it a three dimensional quality that just isn't there w/ a photo.

though honestly sometimes my paintings look better when viewed through the led display of my camera - i guess because they 'glow' from the backlight.

Dubai, eh, to me its a monument to human hubris, a tower of Babel in the sand. - beaches with refrigerated sand? .. almost symbolic of the decadence of globalism.. very different from human achievement - striving for something challenging, like putting man on the moon.

Anonymous said...

I like following the progress of Dubai's supertall construction projects on forums such as SkyscraperCity. Funny thing though; the city and streets nearly always seem strangely deserted. And I have to wonder how sound is the economic rationale of building so many tall buildings when there appears to be plenty of space.