I was at an arduino talk at last year's BaaCamp in Auckland, NZ and there was a guy who had made his own street view style cam for capturing hiking trails using arduino and some cameras. Very cool, imagine he's not the only one either.
All that coral bleaching makes me pretty sad. The reef was much more colourful but it has been declining for a long time now. I wonder how much will be left in another 10 years.
I might be missing something, but why is everyone so excited about this? If you want a great experience of the oceans and reefs out there, you could load up an HD video on YouTube of the Great Barrier Reef, and view something much more immersive.
I'm a huge fan of street view, and I love being able to virtually drive to where I'm going, and find landmarks to help along the way, like for example, a large orange building next to the shop I'm planning to visit. How is ocean street view practical in anyway though? If it's for the user experiencing the ocean or planning their trip, they could upload a quick video of common snorkelling and diving points around coastlines and islands. It would give the user much more information. As of now, it's like flicking through a slideshow, and the navigation is brutal. I'm scratching my head here trying to come up with one thing this does well. As someone else said, I'd like to see more trails added to street view, or even more streets.
Google, since you have free time, here are a couple of ideas...
1. Street view for different seasons. In certain countries, towns and streets look completely different depending on the month. I frequently use street view to browse areas I'm looking to live, or travelling. It would be useful if I could switch the images to summer, winter, etc.
2. Video street view. Much more time consuming to create, since the camera would need to stay in a single spot for a minute at a time, and blurring sensitive information would be more challenging. However, imagine choosing a location on the map, and feeling like you're in that area of the city, or on that quiet road in the middle of the forest where you rotate the camera and follow a bird flying by.
It's overly negative and hyperbolic comments like this on HN that make me think "They thought THAT was bad, I can't imagine posting my own work on here". This a high quality 360 degree view of a path along a coral reef - no it's not particularly practical but are you genuinely scratching your head trying to come up with ONE thing it does well? Do you really find the navigation to be "brutal"? I feel like you're being unnecessarily negative about something that is pretty well executed and at least in part meant to be fun.
I personally have never seen anything like this and thoroughly enjoyed it for a few minutes. As someone else pointed out I was blow away by how well it worked from the google maps app on my phone. And I'm not convinced something like Planet Earth on blu-ray or "HD video on youtube" gives you the same experience unless you could pause it at any point and look around in any direction.
you could load up an HD video on YouTube of the Great Barrier Reef
You can't control a video to see what you want to. You have some control with this underwater Street View. It's the same reason why I find Street View much more valuable than watching videos on YouTube of people driving.
Attach one of those to a diver at popular destinations. On Google maps, show a little video icon. Click the icon, watch, and look around as they swim the location. It's now easier to navigate, and gives you a better representation of snorkelling or diving in that area.
I was expecting a response like this, since I'm aware of these Immersive Media videos. But YouTube doesn't handle these type of videos (yet). They also don't let you control which direction you'd like to travel in.
Street View is more convenient as it offers the same 360 degree view as the Immersive Media videos yet more control like zoom and navigation.
I think it's important to map our (in the Global sense) undersea conditions over time. We hear a great deal about Global Warming - yet it's only the timelapse satellite imagery that concretes it for dismissive minds.
The same can be said for coral reefs, rivers, etc. 'Coral bleaching' is a real problem and reflective of global weather events.
Regarding #2 - In a more idealistic vision of 'Underwater Google Maps', the Voyager Project [1] made an interesting plea to Google to do something similar and provide HD video feeds from UAVs [2].
Edit - Additionally, existing 'undersea documentaries' tend towards visual hyperbole (ooh a yellow fish, damn sharks are scary, etc) - rarely exploring the topography of the ecosystem they're covering. Being able to wander aimlessly underwater may prove more valuable to a student's imagination and provide a more lasting feel for far flung places and culture (or the life of a crab) - as apposed to from a TV, the deck of a cruise ship, or a car window.
Google maps allows you to find things you didn't know existed in the first place. I've often found myself spinning the globe and zooming down onto a remote island's beaches just to see what it looks like on another part of the world. Being able to zoom down even farther to actually see the coral reefs is a natural extension of that. It's about discovery.
It doesn't matter that information about X is available if you can't find out that X exists in the first place.
Being able to control where you go and what you look at has some appeal. This certainly isnt a replacement of a underwater documentary, but it offers an alternative way to experience the reef.
If they had denser panorama coverage it would be better. I agree that this isn't the most usable Street View.
The difference is that Apple is a for-profit company so they have to reinvest a portion of that back into the company, while NASA can - in fact, should - spend the entire budget :)
For sure - I wasn't advocating that Apple devote most resources to space travel, science and exploration. Just that they could afford to buy a launch or two from SpaceX like NASA does. It may even be in their financial interest to put up their own satellites with high-res cameras and telescopes. Mac desktop background images are celestial objects already. "Our latest innovation. Our best work. From Space."
Plus we know that Apple Maps could use a little help.
You can't move around under the sea. It just seems like a geolocation-specific panorama integrated into Google Maps. I want to move around like a submarine!
Zoom out, there are white arrows that appear in the middle-bottom of the screen. Click those to travel in that direction. It's kind of like a choose your own adventure.
And adds to it so much. At first glance, yes there is less of the world to explore, but there is suddenly so much more of the world to understand, and we've hardly touched the surface of that.
