Ten years ago we drove a car around London capturing immersive video linked to a GPS unit and portable GIS system. Little did you know then that Google would take the concept a step further with their Street View system. Back then the resolution was poor and while we are huge fans of panoramic imagery we simply don’t ‘get’ panoramic video.
A still panorama can be a work of art, it is a full 360×180 degree moment captured in time. We have over 100 such images dotted around the blog but we gave up on immersive video as a bad job. That said, its nice to now see the ability to look around such scenes via Flash as the embedded clip from http://demos.immersivemedia.com/ demonstrates:
Perhaps with an increase in resolution its time to take a second look at immersive video, but part of us simply cant quite see the point.
I think it’s pretty impressive in that it’s bringing the City to life in a way you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to interact with it. However a better option would perhaps be a static camera above a busy railway station
I heard about a new technology that allows to retrieve 3d point clouds with x/y/z coordinates from the video filming process as well (similar to LiDAR, but video-based). Anybody else heard about that?
I think it is a great tool. Lets you view video free from the one point perspective. Also works good with GPS enabled. for example http://www.digitalak.com/360/geodigitalak/iberdrola/
Annoyingly also works with U2’s Sweetest Thing.
And its already picked up by the mainstream media, CNN to be precise :
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2010/01/world/haiti.360/index.html
And by the New Scientist Tech Editor tweets about it.
http://twitter.com/tsimonite