Steven Ho lives in Taiwan and is one of the more innovative Google Earth developers. He has been waiting for signs Google would bring Street View to Taiwan, but finally couldn’t wait any longer. So, he spent a few days making his own Street View panoramas for National Taiwan University campus. It turns out March is the month where the Indian azalea bloom, so he decided to take his Street View photos along the famous Royal Palm boulevard. Steven took the time to not only take 150 panoramas, but also process his KML so it looks and acts just like Google Earth’s Street View imagery. He also added in some 3D buildings for the campus and the palm trees. View Steven’s own Taiwan Street View here . You simply double-click on the gold camera icons and you will be flown inside his spherical panorama photos. You can double click on other camera icons to see nearby shots. Here’s his video showing off the collection:
You can read more about what Steven did on his blog GEmvg, where he even shares an attempt to view the Street Views within the GE plugin. But, he notes there are problems with the photo viewer in the GE plugin which make it not work properly. Anyway, if you are impatient to have Street View come to your city, then take notes on how to create your own custom Street View for Google Earth.
Steven Ho has appeared in GEB several times including his collection of 3D buildings for Taiwan, a cool music video done with Google Earth, and a visualization of the Sichuan earthquake.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
This was so neat, I really enjoyed it very much. I must say I never even thought of palm trees in Tiawan!
Anyone is able to upload his panoramas to Gigapan and make his town (city, village) visible worldwide.
They have started to do Streetview imagery here in Canada. It was on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen that Google had streetview cars here in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, and a few other cities such as Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Halafax, Saint John, Saskatoon, Winnepeg, and Quebec City.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Technology/Google+cameras+cruise+streets+Ottawa/1424020/story.html
Here is much more professional project: Romanian company eXtreme Soft Group making street views of bigest cities in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Austria and Russia.
http://www.norc.pl/
Frank, thanks for sharing this. I hope it inspires panorama photographers the world over to do the same thing for their own communities (which are not yet on SV).
I worry about the future of Street View in certain locations where people are being led astray by privacy organization leaders who are eitherly overly zealous or seeking the perfect publicity opportunity at Google’s (and our) expense.
But if your average Joe goes out photographs his or her locale, and uploads to Google Earth, then what can the privacy orgs do about it? Nothing, I hope – since there is no profit to be made. There are many countries I’d love to see on Street View, like those in Central and South America. Maybe I’ll have to go there myself and do it …
When Google will integrate Romanian Map in detail , in Google Earth / Maps ?
Thanks
Cannot log into Google Earth-had my computer worked on recently and have lost your program.
However–I thought my program was Windows XL -but
now I seem to be getting Windows XP–could this make a difference on conecting to Google Earth???
Hello,
It is glad to be a part of this community. As i am doing my masters, I m doing my final project thesis on Geovisualization and 3D modeling.
So can you please guide me on the basics of how google street view upload the images i.e. how a particular image is linked to a particular house or parcel. How is geotagging is useful.
This is purely a study project and not commercial so can you please guide me the steps or procedure so that i can develop a street view of my society area by help of single camera and GPS.
Thank you.
Will be waiting for your prompt reply.