Around the World in 3,305 Frames

To celebrate the 12th birthday of Google Maps Matteo Archondis created this awesome animated tour of Google Maps. The video consists of 3,305 screenshots of the world as seen on Google Maps.

If you want to create your own animated tour then you can use the Ecolapse Street View movie maker. Ecolapse is a nice extension of the Hyperlapse library created by Teehan+Lax (Hyperlapse itself unfortunately seems to no longer exist - although the source code for Hyperlapse is still available on Github). Using Ecolapse you can create an animated Street View drive with a very clever overhead 'small world' effect. Ecolapse distorts the Google Street View imagery to portray an overhead view rather than the normal Google Maps landscape view.

You can create your own animated Ecolapse tour simply by dropping two map markers onto a Google Map. When the animation is created you have the option to pause the animation, zoom in and out of the Street View and use your keyboard arrow keys to scroll through the route frame by frame.