Destinations, The Official Panedia Weblog

People familiar with Google’s Streetview, which is basically panoramic virtual tours on maps, would be forgiven for thinking Panedia is just another ‘me too’ effort.  Allow me to show you how this is not the case.

There are fundamental differences between Streetview & Panedia, which produce vastly different end results.  One isn’t better than the other, they are both great technologies, but they both serve very different purposes and potentially different markets.

Core Philosophies

Google Streetview Goal:
Add visuals to maps so people can look around on the ground, enabling greater understanding of a specific location or area. [Link Out]

Result: Attach panoramic cameras to cars and drive down all streets in a city taking images. Add panoramas to maps. [Larry Page's Idea]

Panedia Goal:
Use Panoramic Virtual Tours to produce the worlds best destination content and create a visual archive of our changing world. Make the content available in as many mediums as possible.

Result: Use professional photographers & equipment along with extensive automated workflows to produce some of the most beautiful destination content available. Shooting places of interest & of historical value.  Use the content in may ways including adding it to maps for online viewing.

Practical Results

As you would expect these philosophies lead to very different results where Street View & Panedia overlap, ie on maps.

Panedia = Low quantity of extremely high quality panoramic virtual tours on maps.
Google Street View = Vast quantity of low quality panoramic virtual tours on maps.

Google Streetview -  Cnr Geary & Stockton St - Union Square, San Francisco.

 

Panedia = Low quantity of extremely high quality virtual tours on maps.

Panedia -  Cnr Geary & Stockton St - Union Square, San Francisco.

Differing Markets

So what markets are most suitable for each technology? 

Streetview offers 10’s of thousands of low quality panoramas of a given city/area making it ideal for looking up a particular address to see what it’s like at that spot. The recent mashup of Streetview content on Trulia, a major US realestate site, is an outstanding use of Steetview in this context. 

Travelers though, need to know something about a city before going to Streetview as no one has time to look through 10,000+ panoramas.  Of course you can search for particular places in Google maps and look at them in Streetview, but you still need to know interesting places to search in that city before starting. There is far too much choice to just start clicking randomly on Streetview panoramas.

Panedia on the other hand will offer 100’s to 1000’s of very high quality panoramas of a given city/area.  These panoramas will mainly be shot in areas of interest for travelers.  Therefore the viewer doesn’t need to know anything about a city before discovering amazing places to experience.  On Panedia those places have already been selected and shot by professional photographers. The viewer doesn’t need to open a panorama to find interesting places to see, as each one has a thumbnail image of the best view from that spot….this thumbnail is instantly available on the map, and permanently visible in the thumbnail sidebar. 

Panedia content is not shot from a car, so it can be produced anywhere, allowing travelers to experience places a long way from the road.  From beaches and National Parks, to trails, mountains, waterfalls, accommodation, tours, shows & a lot more.

Conclusion: viewers needing total coverage of a city/place need streetview, viewers looking for high quality imagery or looking for interesting places in cities they don’t know will be better off on Panedia. (Assuming coverage is available)

Other Content Uses

As mentioned already Streetview content is being put to great use by Trulia with a lot more to come no doubt. 

Panedia content can be used online & offline.  The resolution & quality of the master panoramic files is such that they can be used for poster prints, magazine reproduction & billboards.  The can also be used in video up to HD and even cinema resolution. Panedia content is also being used to produce desktop wallpapers at 2560×1600 up to triple monitors. [Link Out Wallpaper.panedia.com]

Final Thoughts

Both Google Streetview & Panedia are amazing examples of what can be accomplished with georeferenced panoramic virtual tours, while they represent the extreme opposites of the spectrum in quality vs quantity.  In a nutshell, Streetview is an engineers system for getting maximum coverage while Panedia is a photographers system for achieving maximum quality.

The best solution for users would be a combination of technologies, offering the huge coverage of Streetview and the amazing quality of Panedia’s everything but street view content.  With the new Streetview API we plan to implement this solution when Google releases their Australian Streetview content, rumoured to be launching mid 2008.

[This is the first in a series of articles comparing some of the panorama/maps sites from the highly biased position of Panedia's lead photographer & owner.]

Last week Ben Scheirman over at the Flux88 blog did a quick review of an important feature on our Wallpaper site. He noted that we read user information from visitors to wallpaper.panedia.com and customise the site to their needs as best we can.

This feature started as a simple concept that grew to become a very useful aspect of the site. We have plans to further extend this type of functionality over time. Thanks Ben.

With Panedia Wallpaper I’m introducing the first of many products and services to come out of the huge Panedia panoramic content library. The site has been up for a few weeks testing in narrow release, today we give it the official heave ho into wide release. (Tell your friends about it :)

Panedia Desktop Wallpaper contains over 40 wallpapers at present, with a ‘Free Daily’ wallpaper being added every day. The daily wallpaper update is available free for 24hrs only, before it goes into the members gallery. There is also a public gallery (free) which is added to monthly. Each wallpaper on the site is available in 16 sizes from 800×600 to 2560×1600 for single, dual and triple monitors in the 3 common ratios 4:3, 5:4 & Widescreen (16:10). We produce 130 separate images for each wallpaper to provide all the sizes for MAC and PC computers.

Members (paid) have access to all wallpapers at all times, plus the master files used to generate the wallpapers. With these files members can cut up their own wallpaper sizes, for up to 4 or 5 monitors. We’re working on tools to enhance this capability in the short to medium term.

Members can also use Panedia Wallpaper as a form of Service, I’ve called it WAAS (Wallpaper As A Service) for want of a better term, whereby they need not horde images on their computers for wallpaper. A member can access the site at any time from any computer and download the exact size image(s) they require. Using the ‘Set As Desktop Background’ function of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari the wallpaper image is then set as the computer wallpaper. VERY quick & VERY simple.

Each of the wallpaper download pages link into to our pano/maps site maps.panedia.com to provide a virtual tour view & show where the image was photographed. Eventually users will be able to link back and forth on a single panorama between all the Panedia sites depending on what they require. Panoramas, Virtual Tours, Maps, Wallpapers plus more.

Finally there are RSS feeds to the galleries & Free Daily Wallpaper to make grabbing the images you like easy, and we’re in the process of setting up some interesting competitions to allow viewers to win subscriptions and more.

Please have a look at the new site, and let us know what you think of it, as the site will evolve according to the feedback we receive. We’d particularly like to hear from you if you have any difficulty with any part of the site.

Aaron Spence
CEO & Lead Photographer.