Building Movie Map -- A Tool for Exploring Areas in a City -- and its Evaluation
This system provides an improved urban exploration tool for general users, offering a better user experience than existing solutions like GSV.
This paper introduces a Movie Map system designed for urban exploration, which processes omnidirectional videos to create navigable street views. User studies indicated that their system provided a better user experience compared to Google Street View (GSV) for landmark finding.
We propose a new Movie Map system, with an interface for exploring cities. The system consists of four stages; acquisition, analysis, management, and interaction. In the acquisition stage, omnidirectional videos are taken along streets in target areas. Frames of the video are localized on the map, intersections are detected, and videos are segmented. Turning views at intersections are subsequently generated. By connecting the video segments following the specified movement in an area, we can view the streets better. The interface allows for easy exploration of a target area, and it can show virtual billboards of stores in the view. We conducted user studies to compare our system to the GSV in a scenario where users could freely move and explore to find a landmark. The experiment showed that our system had a better user experience than GSV.