FlyCam and FlyAbout

Years before StreetView, my colleague Don Kimber and I built a motion-video version called FlyAbout, using a custom automobile-mounted panoramic video system combined with a GPS logger. We reverse-engineered the Yahoo Maps API to link our video with a map interface. Unlike StreetView, our system let you play continuous video along a path chosen by the user, including around corners.

Here is more information on composoting panoramic video in the FlyAbout system. The system is also described in the papers and patent below.

"FlyAbout: Spatially Indexed Panoramic Video," in Proc. ACM Multimedia, Oct. 2001.

"FlyCam: Practical Panoramic Video," in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, vol. III, pp. 1419-1422

"Detecting Path Intersections in Panoramic Video", IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 2002, August 26

US Patent 7,289,138: Intersection detection in panoramic video