Do you like to visit popular places in the world, but struggling with your small budget and no hope to visit those place in the near future. Don’t worry Google comes up with a new feature called ‘Google Maps Photo Tours’, which helps you to virtually visit all this places without consuming your tiny budget. Google Map’s this new feature ‘Photo tours’ let you see amazing 3D images of more than 15,000 landmarks around the world. The photos come from the public galleries at Picasa and Panaramio, which will helps you to look at some of the planet’s must-see wonders ! Google displays an image preview next to the local search results that have photo tours, so it’s easy to find them in the Google search.The feature uses WebGL, so it works perfectly in Chrome. Wondering how Google did it? Then read on…
To produce these photo tours, Google used advanced computer vision techniques to create a 3D experience from public, user-contributed Picasa and Panaromio photos. Google started by finding clusters of overlapping photos around major landmarks. From the photos, the system derives the 3D shape of each landmark and computes the location and orientation of each photo. Google Maps then selects a path through the best images, and adds 3D transitions to seamlessly guide you from photo to photo as if you’re literally flying around the landmark and viewing it from different perspectives.
Here is a YouTube video describing the feature. Did you liked the Photo Tours? Can you suggest some alternative methods to do it?
