San Francisco — Google’s most popular and yet extremely contentious 360-degree Street View mapping service last week received an impressive update for publishing pictures of public spaces, now delivers a smart navigation technique that allows greater freedom of movement within roadway panoramas. So far, users had to navigate through Street View using some pretty basic forward and backward arrows along the roads, but things are better now.
These improvements are collectively being dubbed by Google as Smart Navigation, which relieves a users from the rudimentary road arrows Street View was using for navigation. The main change being introduced is the ability to navigate by simply double clicking on a place or object you want to see, as opposed to having to use the arrows displayed on the roads like before.
“We have been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas using laser point clouds and differences between consecutive pictures,” Daniel Filip, a computer vision tech lead at Google Zurich, wrote in a blog post.
As you are cruising though Street View, you will now observe a shaded oval around your cursor when you are following a road, and a shaded rectangle when you are moving across the facades of buildings.
The result: users can move around panoramas by double-clicking with the cursor on any place or object they want to view. A 3D-aware circle indicates where the pointer is on the image, which Google affectionately calls a “pancake” because of its appearance when laying flat to the object where the mouse is pointing.
You can move the “pancake” around and, when double-clicking on it, you will be shown the best panorama in that direction. At times, the smart navigation pancake will allow you to zoom on certain images by double-clicking, showing the best view of the selected location. In case you get lost wandering around the panoramas, a helpful back icon will take you to the initial route.
“Today, we are extremely excited to introduce a new mode of navigation which liberates you from the road arrows and gets you where you want to go in just a few clicks,” Filip explained in a post on the Google Lat Long blog. “You can now use Street View’s smart navigation to travel to a new place just by double clicking on the place or object you would like to see.”
For instance, if you click the front door of this building in the image below, you will get a view like this:
And in some instance, the “pancake” will display a tiny magnifying glass at the bottom right indicating that double clicking will let you zoom in on the present image rather than move you to a closer location. You can also click the return arrow to get back to the previous location.
The overall effect of Google’s ingenious calculation is that would-be stalkers, privacy invaders, and busybodies — at least the ones not already outside your door — can explore more of your virtual neighborhood.
If you have moved away too far, simply hit the return arrow in the address box to go back to your previous location.
“Not only is it an easier way to browse cities in Street View, it allows you to do superhuman things like jump from one side of a river to another to see a faraway building,” Filip wrote.
The Google Street View guys made this video to better illustrate the new feature:
In addition to this Google has posted some interactive examples of the new navigation on their Lat Long Blog here.
Nevertheless, with so much effort to bring the service to the masses Google’s Street View image-capturing service still continues to meet with resistance. Following the launch of Street View in the United Kingdom in March, Google found itself having to deny claims that its cameras had captured the image of a naked toddler.
Next, Google’s Street View faced a few bumps down the road in Japan and Greece, where privacy advocates protested against the service. Due to this, Google will have to re-shoot Street View photographs in 12 Japanese cities.
Also in May, Google reached a deal with German authorities to offer its Street View service in Germany, where privacy concerns are amplified by past wars.
Regardless of being hounded by one and all, Google is very much detrmined to continue mapping the world’s cities.