Early days of Streetview: a memoir

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in google on (#3PT)
story imageLike it or hate it, Google's Streetview map interface exists and is used every day by all sorts of people. Getting to the point of a usable map interface wasn't easy. Here are some war stories from the trenches by Iain McClatchie, who participated in the effort.
We didn't know it at the time, but the problems we were having were essentially due to the high resolution we were trying to shoot. High resolution from a moving platform leads to short exposure times. Short exposure times require large relative apertures to get enough sensitivity. Compared to small format cameras, our focal lengths were fairly long (28 mm, IIRC), so that meant much larger apertures, much larger photocurrents, and thus the problems we were fighting. In hindsight, the two real solutions were lower resolution or CMOS sensors. Rather than try those, I tried to make the high resolution CCD work with shutters (the R3 camera) and choppers (R4).
It's a pretty amazing project and must have been an awesome time to be in on the fun.
Reply 2 comments

UI changes (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-04 03:27 (#2B9)

Lately when I use Google Maps I often get a crappy "new look" user interface. It has all the signs of "change for the sake of change" and I find it very hard to figure out where all the options are (many are hidden).

The original Maps (and street view) interfaces were pretty good. I wish the original team would just keep on making incremental improvements.

Google made him take it down (Score: 2, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-04 08:22 (#2BC)

Here's his comment post: "I can call Google legal and ask them to give me some free, biased legal advice on what's okay and not, but I suspect I'm just going to get someone whose job it is to further intimidate me into self censorship the same way China intimidates all its locals."Looks like Google lawyers told him to take it down. Remember kids, the best censorship is self censorship! http://dictatorshandbook.net/book/node105.html