The Floating Shiny Knot is Back

One of my favorite Street View experiments (from the days when Street View experiments were all the rage), is back.

Ten years ago I described the Floating Shiny Knot as,

"an impressive experiment using canvas with Street View. The application superimposes an animated shiny knot on top of any Street View image (you can choose a chrome or glass finish for the knot). You can even rotate and drag the Street View around and the Floating Shiny Knot soars to even higher levels of impressiveness."

The original Floating Shiny Knot used the GSVpano.js library to stitch together Google Maps Street View images, from any requested location, into a 360 degree panorama. Unfortunately Google eventually asked for the GSVpano.js library to be removed as it was enabling people to break the terms of the Google Maps API.Thus the original Floating Shiny Knot stopped working (around 9 years ago I think).

Now it is back. The new Floating Shiny Knot uses PanomNom.js (described as 'a spiritual successor to GSVPano.js') to create the Street View panoramas. Despite this change under the hood the new Floating Shiny Knot is essentially the same as the original. Search anywhere in the world (where Google Street View imagery is available) and you can view a 360 degree panorama of the location decorated with a floating shiny knot.