Street View Distortion?

[Judy Coy]

I have several historical images that I'd like to pin to Street View, but the view presented is distorted as if it were being seen through a fish-eye lens. The identical buildings/street viewed using Google maps does not have this distortion. Am I doing something wrong? Is there an explanation for the difference between the Historypin Street View and that of Google Maps?

Judy Coy

San Anselmo Historical Museum

[Jon Voss]

Hi Judy, 

Can you send a couple of links to the locations or pins?

Thanks, Jon

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[Judy Coy]

Jon,

Here is a pin: http://www.historypin.com/channels/view/55496/#!map/#!/geo:37.97316,-122.562204/zoom:20/dialog:242527/tab:streetview/

[Translucence]

Ahhh yes I've noticed this as well.

Judy's provided a pin but here's a direct comparison in a picture.

On the left is Google Street View of a straight edge of a street, on the right HistoryPin's fisheye view.

I suspect it might have something to do with Google Street View not being able to zoom out far enough for HistoryPin's needs?

[Andrew Leahy]

it's more to do with how the panorama is projected (drawn) onto a flat screen rather than zoom.

with panoramic street view imagery there are a few options, which all look a little bit different.

option 1 - the panorama is displayed using the source equirectangular image. This has fish-eye-like distortion, with  horizontal straight lines look curved away for the center of the image. like the street gutter in the image attached previously. (this is what historypin seems to use)

option 2  - the panorama is wrapped onto a virtual sphere and should look 'correct' but requires more grunt on the client side (this is what maps.google.com mostly uses... depending)

by default the projection is selected based on the characteristics of the computer showing the street view.

the historypin application could set the default rendering 'mode' (html4/webgl/html5) to the undistorted one. but the risk is it may not work well on some systems.

See https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/maps/D-zAB9gwS7k/9m1QZ0L2cqUJ

Andrew | eResearch | University of Western Sydney

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[Mike Strange]

If you are able to zoom in before pinning the overlay (as Judy did - see zoom:20 in the link) the fish-eye effect is reduced.

Here's one I did earlier:

http://www.historypin.com/channels/view/2038#!map/index/#!/geo:51.896289,-0.21261200000000002/zoom:20/dialog:60426/tab:streetview/

but I am sure that when I first pinned the above the fish-eye effect was not there, that is a change in the Street View presentation.

Mike

[Rebekkah Abraham]

I don't have a strong technical understanding, but I believe the difference might because on Historypin we use the Google Maps API (Version 3) which has some differences with the standard Google Maps & Street view.

And Mike is correct that in earlier versions of Historypin, we did not have this distortion. This is because we were using an older version of the API and when we upgraded to version 3, this introduced the fish eye element.

Andrew - thanks for your technical assessment and recommendations, I will share it with our team.

Rebekkah
Historypin Operations Director

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Rebekkah Abraham
Historypin Operations Director
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