Saturday, March 01, 2014

Opensource Street View


Mapillary is marketing itself as a kind of crowdsourced alternative to Street View. Users of the Mapillary Android and iOS app can take photographs which are added to the Mapillary photo map of the world. The Mapillary map can then be browsed by anyone wishing to view photographs by location.

The map shows the location of submitted photographs on a Leaflet.js created OpenStreetMap. The interface is similar to Street View in so far as blue lines on the map show where sequences of photographs are available and arrows overlaid on the photos provide links to adjacent views. The big difference between Mapillary and Street View however is that Mapillary displays still photographs and not 360 degree interactive panoramas.

Mapillary also provides an API so that developers can use the photographs in their own apps. The API is free to use for non-commercial use and for commercial use with fewer than 1000 API calls a month.

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