Re: Google Maps Street View Tracker
Florismart Sujumnong
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
PLEASE NOTE: Google Earth Blog is no longer writing regular posts. As a result, we are not accepting new comments or questions about Google Earth. If you have a question, use the official Google Earth and Maps Forums or the Google Earth Community Forums.CommentsChris says
Is there a way to find out when the Google Street car will be back around to take more updated photos? Specifically I was looking for Austin TX for a client that renovated a hotel and would like this reflected.
Saw it passing the Wayne Township Fire Training center in Indianapolis today. Hope it will go to Westfield and shoot pics of the Grand Park. How long does it take new pics (taken today for example) to show up?
How often do you guys intend to revisit areas? I recently opened a new mechanic & repair workshop in Sydney Australia. As the building is a new building prospective customers cant find me on street view.
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Google Street View provides panoramic 360 degree views from designated roads throughout its coverage area. Street View's API coverage is the same as that for the Google Maps application ( ). The list of currently supported cities for Street View is available at the Google Maps website.
Although Street View can be used within a standalone DOM element, it is most useful when indicating a location on a map. By default, Street View is enabled on a map, and a Street View Pegman control appears integrated within the navigation (zoom and pan) controls. You may hide this control within the map's MapOptions by setting streetViewControl to false. You may also change the default position of the Street View control by setting the Map's streetViewControlOptions.position property to a new ControlPosition.
The Street View Pegman control allows you to view Street View panoramas directly within the map. When the user clicks and holds the Pegman, the map updates to show blue outlines around Street View-enabled streets, offering a user experience similar to the Google Maps app.
Street View images are supported through use of the StreetViewPanorama object, which provides an API interface to a Street View "viewer." Each map contains a default Street View panorama, which you can retrieve by calling the map's getStreetView() method. When you add a Street View control to the map by setting its streetViewControl option to true, you automatically connect the Pegman control to this default Street View panorama.
You may also create your own StreetViewPanorama object and set the map to use that instead of the default, by setting the map's streetView property explicitly to that constructed object. You may wish to override the default panorama if you want to modify default behavior, such as the automatic sharing of overlays between the map and the panorama. (See Overlays within Street View below.)
You may instead wish to display a StreetViewPanorama within a separate DOM element, often a element. Simply pass the DOM element within the StreetViewPanorama's constructor. For optimum display of images, we recommend a minimum size of 200 pixels by 200 pixels.
The StreetViewPanorama constructor also allows you to set the Street View location and point of view using the StreetViewOptions parameter. You may call setPosition() and setPov() on the object after construction to change its location and POV.
The Street View location defines the placement of the camera focus for an image, but it does not define the orientation of the camera for that image. For that purpose, the StreetViewPov object defines two properties:
On devices that support device orientation events, the API offers users the ability to change the Street View point of view based on the movement of the device. Users can look around by moving their devices. This is called motion tracking or device rotation tracking.
As app developer, you can change the default behavior as follows:
- Enable or disable the motion tracking functionality. By default, motion tracking is enabled on any device that supports it. The following sample disables motion tracking, but leaves the motion tracking control visible. (Note that the user can turn on motion tracking by tapping the control.)var panorama = new google.maps.StreetViewPanorama( document.getElementById('pano'), position: lat: 37.869260, lng: -122.254811, pov: heading: 165, pitch: 0, motionTracking: false );
- Hide or show the motion tracking control. By default, the control is shown on devices that support motion tracking. The user can tap the control to turn motion tracking on or off. Note that the control will never appear if the device doesn't support motion tracking, regardless of the value of motionTrackingControl.
The default StreetViewPanorama object supports the native display of map overlays. Overlays generally appear at "street level" anchored at LatLng positions. (Markers will appear with their tails anchored to the location's horizontal plane within the Street View panorama for example.)
Currently, the types of overlays which are supported on Street View panoramas are limited to Markers, InfoWindows and custom OverlayViews. Overlays which you display on a map may be displayed on a Street View panorama by treating the panorama as a substitute for the Map object, calling setMap() and passing the StreetViewPanorama as an argument instead of a map. Info windows similarly may be opened within a Street View panorama by calling open(), passing the StreetViewPanorama() instead of a map.
Additionally, when creating a map with a default StreetViewPanorama, any markers created on a map are shared automatically with the map's associated Street View panorama, provided that panorama is visible. To retrieve the default Street View panorama, call getStreetView() on the Map object. Note that if you explicitly set the map's streetView property to a StreetViewPanorama of your own construction, you will override the default panorama.
The following example shows markers denoting various locations around Astor Place, New York City. Toggle the display to Street View to show the shared markers displaying within the StreetViewPanorama.
When displaying a StreetViewPanorama, a variety of controls appear on the panorama by default. You can enable or disable these controls by setting their appropriate fields within the StreetViewPanoramaOptions to true or false:
You may wish to programmatically determine the availability of Street View data, or return information about particular panoramas, without requiring direct manipulation of a map/panorama. You may do so using the StreetViewService object, which provides an interface to the data stored in Google's Street View service.
Accessing the Street View service is asynchronous, since the Google Maps API needs to make a call to an external server. For that reason, you need to pass a callback method to execute upon completion of the request. This callback method processes the result.
A request using StreetViewPanoRequest returns panoramadata given a reference ID which uniquely identifies the panorama. Note thatthese reference IDs are only stable for the lifetime of the imagery of thatpanorama.
The function getPanorama() needs a callback function to execute upon retrieval of a result from the Street View service. This callback function returns a set of panorama data within a StreetViewPanoramaData object and a StreetViewStatus code denoting the status of the request, in that order.
Note that this data object is not a StreetViewPanorama object itself. To create a Street View object using this data, you would need to create a StreetViewPanorama and call setPano(), passing it the ID as noted in the returned location.pano field.
The following code creates a StreetViewService that responds to user clicks on a map by creating markers which, when clicked, display a StreetViewPanorama of that location. The code uses the contents of StreetViewPanoramaData returned from the service.
The Maps JavaScript API supports the display of custom panoramas within the StreetViewPanorama object. Using custom panoramas, you can display the interior of buildings, views from scenic locations, or anything from your imagination. You can even link these custom panoramas to Google's existing Street View panoramas.
Each Street View panorama is an image or set of images that provides a full 360 degree view from a single location. The StreetViewPanorama object uses images that conform to the equirectangular (Plate Carre) projection. Such a projection contains 360 degrees of horizontal view (a full wrap-around) and 180 degrees of vertical view (from straight up to straight down). These fields of view result in an image with an aspect ratio of 2:1. A full wrap-around panorama is shown below.
Panorama images are generally obtained by taking multiple photos from one position and stitching them together using panorama software. (See Wikipedia's Comparison of photo stitching applications for more information.) Such images should share a single "camera" locus, from which each of the panorama images are taken. The resulting 360 degree panorama can then define a projection on a sphere with the image wrapped to the two-dimensional surface of the sphere.
Treating the panorama as a projection on a sphere with a rectilinear coordinate system is advantageous when dividing up the image into rectilinear tiles, and serving images based on computed tile coordinates.
Street View also supports different levels of image detail through the use of a zoom control, which allows you to zoom in and out from the default view. Generally, Street View provides five levels of zoom resolution for any given panorama image. If you were to rely on a single panorama image to serve all zoom levels, such an image would either necessarily be quite large and significantly slow down your application, or be of such poor resolution at higher zoom levels that you would serve a poorly pixellated image. Luckily, however, we can use a similar design pattern used to serve Google's map tiles at different zoom levels to provide appropriate resolution imagery for panoramas at each zoom level.
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