Kind: captions
Language: en
street view it's a pretty big world out
there especially when you can find
yourself being chased down the street by
two people in diving outfits keen on
chasing you as you scroll through
but not only that we can view past
images to see how landscapes of city
lines have changed over time
or to even drive down some of japan's
busiest streets
just with the simple click of a mouse
from the comfort of your own home
yes you guessed it today we're going to
be looking at different types of street
view and how they can help you in your
location-based visual research
[Music]
hi everyone welcome back to this series
on how to do open source investigations
from home i'm ben and this is part 11 so
let's get started
this session would be a no-brainer to
start with google maps and google maps
street view so here we are in san jose
and we're looking at the computer
history museum to simply have a look at
google street view all we have to do is
click this little person once and we can
see all of the options of locations that
we want to look at
and this just shows an interesting
element of the google street view
because what we can do
is it's even available inside and we can
walk around indoors for some locations
now obviously there's a lot more
different locations that we can look at
so for example if we have a look at
london
we can see just how much the
availability of street view is in london
now one thing i did want to share with
you is the availability to look at past
imagery on google street view this is
quite rare for street view sources so
for example if i was to go to twitter's
headquarters
in san francisco and i was to have a
look at this location sure we might be
able to see imagery from 2021 but we can
also see imagery from in the past as
well and if we have a look at all of
these little dots each one of these
represents past street view imagery
that's available on google maps street
view so we can see what the building
looked like if it had any renovations
perhaps if twitter's sign was a little
bit different
uh we can keep going back here we are in
april 2011. it's not even twitter
headquarters it's actually uh sf marked
and we can even see when twitter
or or the window of time that twitter
might have taken that over so
uh here is may 2012 march 2013 and then
february 2014 we can see that uh twitter
now has their their
banner up on that building as well
that's really good useful thing when
we're looking at the changes of
buildings the changes of areas and
especially when you're looking at
geolocating something and you've already
got an image and you've matched it
on the imagery there
love the little dance that these guys
are doing over here
next up i want to introduce you to apple
maps it's a platform that you can view
satellite imagery in 3d buildings
at the moment we are in japan having a
look at tokyo
and you can see that it's very similar
to google earth in terms of 3d use
in terms of all of the sort of different
databases that we can pull into this as
well but apple maps also has its own
street view so let's go down to the
street level and have a look at why
that's a really cool function
this is the shibuya crossing in japan
which is a very popular
crossing that many of you would have
seen in different movies or different
images
and let's have a look at what happens
when we drive through you can see how
the street view images are almost
blending together like a video this is
much stronger than the blend that you'll
see in google street view or any other
types of street view
street view applications which is quite
cool
one of the more useful resources that i
found
specifically in areas that don't have
google street view
coverage
is map hillary map hillary is one of
those resources that you really
shouldn't forget about especially if
you're struggling for coverage in your
research
and you're finding that maybe things
like google maps really don't have that
extent of coverage that you're looking
for
and it really does happen so here's an
example of mumbai which is a major city
a huge population and yet google maps
has severely limited coverage of google
street view and yet if we have a look at
say
uh some of the areas in mumbai and then
we have a look at map hillary look at
the coverage that we have here
so many of the roads or quite a few of
the roads at least have decent coverage
and a lot more coverage than what you've
got on google maps there for what it is
it's so simple to use as well so you can
see that when you zoom in a little bit
closer
on the roads and streets and mapillary
where there's green lines
and these are just the images that have
been taken along that route
they're not 360 degree images like you
would have in apple maps or google
street view
but rather just single images
but it's still really really useful i've
often used it for my work in mandalay
for example and you can see some of the
streets around here with
quite a fair bit of coverage uh for
for mandalay um
and you can sort of start to see start
to imagine how how really useful uh
something like mapillary can actually be
so we've had a look at google street
view we've looked at mapillary and we've
looked at the apple maps application
all of those are linked down in the
description below but what else can we
use well there are some site-specific
sources of data as well so one of them
for example is
yandex maps and yandex maps has a
panorama and photo option
so for example here we are looking at
moscow
and with this option we can really just
drive around on some of these streets
and you'll also notice that you've got
the same layering to view the links of
those shops or those businesses
the driving is really simple uh it's
very similar also to what you would see
with google maps street view just like
with yandex uh we also have baidu maps
which is really useful if you're looking
for street view data in china
specifically
so all we have to do is down the bottom
right here we can just select this icon
which gives us essentially a map of the
available street data that we have
available to us you can see the little
icon that i'm dragging over the map here
shows like a little camera
and we can essentially just click and
drop that down on there
and this is really useful it also has
the 360 degree photos as well
so we can get a full range of vision
around there
and we're also able to drive around on
the street very similar to what you
would do with google maps or with apple
maps as well
we also have that great zoom function as
well
so we can really
look around
and have a good glimpse as to what's
going around in in specific streets as
well
while there are a lot more sub
applications that you can use for street
view data another one that i wanted to
include in this tutorial is called
carter view
again you'll find all the links to these
in the description below carter view i
notice has
has strong
data for specific locations for example
here is the data that you'll see in
indonesia
specifically jakarta
and if we click on this we can see all
of the available imagery
from that location
it does take a little bit of time to
load
i notice but the functionality is a
little bit different in that you are
viewing individual photos from a scene
and if you have a look down here you can
see that for example on this track
there are 196 photos taken along this
along this specific track and so we can
just click through
and play the next and play the next and
play the next much like
map hillary we can't view a 360
image so it's not like what we have in
google maps or apple maps or or baidu as
well but we can definitely keep playing
through and driving along a specific
street
i really hope you got something out of
this session street view is often
underrated in open source investigations
and can be so helpful in verifying
locations verifying images but also
investigating and researching locations
and seeing what's there what's not there
what has been there over time as well
and we've gone through some really
interesting resources to do that so
google's street view with its massive
amount of coverage but also the history
of google street view and being able to
view things in the past that you
wouldn't normally be able to see
we've also gone through
apple street view with its really cool
click-throughs we've gone through map
hillary as well for places that might
not have that coverage that you might
only find on apple or google and we've
also gone through some sub or or smaller
street view applications that might have
more coverage in specific geographic
locations or be more popular for those
areas so really hope you got something
out of this and please do have a look at
some of the links that i've shared in
the description below play around with
them click through them check out some
of the locations that you're researching
you never know what you might find
[Music]