Monday, September 04, 2017

On the Road 2.0


If Jack Kerouac was alive today he could avoid all that budget travel, teenage angst and broken dreams by traveling across the USA on Google Maps Street View. That's what Lionel Tardy did. And he's documented his virtual journey in A Road Trip Through West USA.

A Road Trip Through West USA is a hyperlapse journey using Google Maps Street View images. It animates a roundabout journey from LA to San Francisco (via Las Vegas) as seen on Google Maps Street View. You can experience the whole 3,500 km journey by watching this animation of 344,118 Street View images. Alternatively you can take a short-cut by jumping to locations along the route by clicking on the route plan along the bottom of the screen.

If you want to make your own Street View road-trip then you can use the same script that Lionel used to make his journey. Lionel's Roadtrip script is available on GitHub. The script automatically downloads the links to all the Street View images from your chosen starting location to your destination (it actually gets one every 10 meters but you can change that to any distance you want). The road-trip script will then load one image every 40ms and display it as an animated Street View journey.

Also see: Hyperlapse - another JavaScript hyperlapse utility for Google Maps Street View

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