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MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

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Re: MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

#41

Post by aroon »

bd wrote: post #11
Groxx wrote: post #6

Looks like they're randomly dropping the viewer until they get a hit (I've gone over "searching (600)"). I wonder if there's a faster way to do that with their API?

Completely random drop would fare really bad (street view is very rare compared to Earth's surface). What I would do is a sort of "computer vision". Map has well defined colors for features, so you just need to check pixels with proper shading. This should be quite easy as street view availability seems like a transparent overlay image, so you even wouldn't need to distinguish it from other map features. And even if…

In the time it took to act smart you could have just read the code and seen that his intuition was mostly right. The code is extremely simple. It reads like a half day project just for fun that happened to get picked up on HN. It doesn't seem to be at all related to his line of study either.

For you interest and information, he has a defined set of bounding boxes in the world for each of the user pickable regions. He generates random lat lons until one lands in an enabled region's bounding box and then makes a request for street view data to google. If google returns a 200 he sets the street view display to the lat Lon and otherwise tries to find another lat Lon. If he ever gets a 500 from Google he quits.

Re: MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

#43

Post by jacobolus »

dangoldin wrote: post #2

Makes you realize how rural the world actually is. You lose sight of that living in a big city.

How rural it is, by area (or by street distance) sure, but by population the world is now > 50% urban. (And the “more developed regions” are 75% urban by population.)

Re: MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

#45

Post by bd »

aroon wrote: post #41
bd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely random drop would fare really bad (street view is very rare compared to Earth's surface). What I would do is a sort of "computer vision". Map has well defined colors for features, so you just need to check pixels with proper shading. This should be quite easy as street view availability seems like a transparent overlay image, so you even wouldn't need to distinguish it from other map features. And even if…

In the time it took to act smart you could have just read the code and seen that his intuition was mostly right. The code is extremely simple. It reads like a half day project just for fun that happened to get picked up on HN. It doesn't seem to be at all related to his line of study either. For you interest and information, he has a defined set of bounding boxes in the world for each of the user pickable regions. He…

I don't understand your comment.

I wasn't trying to figure out how it was done, I was trying to figure out how to do it fast (irrespective of the present implementation), responding to the question:

"I wonder if there's a faster way to do that with their API?"

I did check the source code. The most time is spent doing dozens to hundreds requests to Google API.

If instead of this you generated random locations just from "blue" regions of StreetView coverage, user experience would be better.

The simplest way how to do it would be to fetch StreetView coverage overlay PNG and use canvas getImageData to check pixel values for random locations, thus moving costly roundtrip validity query mostly to the browser.

This is not something terribly difficult and perfectly suitable for half day fun project.

Re: MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

#46

Post by harshpotatoes »

nostrademons wrote: post #28
harshpotatoes wrote: post #15

I didn't realize how much of the world Google had mapped... It seems like just last year that Seattle wasn't even included yet...

On the contrary, I'm amazed at just how much of Africa is South Africa. Out of maybe a dozen tries, I have had one African hit that was not in South Africa, and that was a Spanish-owned island off the coast of the Sahara.

Ok, so maybe not the world. But I'm still impressed by the amount of north america/europe that is mapped.

Re: MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

#47

Post by GFischer »

greendestiny wrote: post #40
djacobs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird... the first five scenes I saw were fantastic, exotic, sharp images, and I was so inspired I sent the link to several of my family and friends. Now, I'm clicking through, and I can't find any more good ones. Weird?

Just untick everything except Europe.

Indeed... first it showed me some rural area in Scotland, then some beautiful suburban place in Denmark, then somewhere equally beautiful in Holland - I'm amazed at those countries.

I'd love to live in such a place.

Re: MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

#48

Post by blasdel »

bd wrote: post #45
aroon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the time it took to act smart you could have just read the code and seen that his intuition was mostly right. The code is extremely simple. It reads like a half day project just for fun that happened to get picked up on HN. It doesn't seem to be at all related to his line of study either. For you interest and information, he has a defined set of bounding boxes in the world for each of the user pickable regions. He…

I don't understand your comment. I wasn't trying to figure out how it was done, I was trying to figure out how to do it fast (irrespective of the present implementation), responding to the question: "I wonder if there's a faster way to do that with their API?" I did check the source code. The most time is spent doing dozens to hundreds requests to Google API. If instead of this you generated random locations just fro…

You can't use getImageData within a element that has cross-domain data as children. Otherwise it'd be the ultimate cross-site scripting hole!

It's not something terribly difficult — it's something that is completely impossible for a very good reason.

Re: MIT Globe Genie (Random Street View)

#49

Post by bd »

blasdel wrote: post #48
bd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your comment. I wasn't trying to figure out how it was done, I was trying to figure out how to do it fast (irrespective of the present implementation), responding to the question: "I wonder if there's a faster way to do that with their API?" I did check the source code. The most time is spent doing dozens to hundreds requests to Google API. If instead of this you generated random locations just fro…

You can't use getImageData within a element that has cross-domain data as children. Otherwise it'd be the ultimate cross-site scripting hole! It's not something terribly difficult — it's something that is completely impossible for a very good reason.

If only :).

There are ways how to get around cross-domain security restrictions. Long ago, I have done it myself by a simple server-side proxy here (few lines of PHP):

http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/evolve/

About Globe Genie optimization. In fact, I implemented it, sent a patch to the author and it's already live there (check the source code). It cuts cross-network locations validity lookups by about 60%.

Here I didn't do proxy, just fetched a complete set of overlay tiles once and stitched them together with a Python script:

http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/gg_overlay_optimization/data/ov...

It's just a static prebaked lookup map (served from the same domain), though if you really want to have it up-to-date, you could hook up Python script to cron.

All this took few hours (Sunday evening hacking) and was quite fun to do.

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