If Tom Cochrane had us believe in anything it was that life is a highway. Now, a service out of Canada is showing us that Cochrane’s song may well be true, doing its part to stitch together Google Street View in a neat timelapse video.
Maybe “timelapse” is the wrong word, because what Canadian developers Teehan+Lax have created is called the “Hyperlapse,” a webpage that lets you pinpoint positions in a simple point A to point B path on Google Maps, and have the website spit out a big fullscreen animation that shows how it would look if Google’s Street View was driving you from A to B.
You can map out any path on Google – driving across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, or even cruising down a highway in Los Angeles – and watch the hyperlapse take place.
Our experiments found that the shorter distances that were drawn in a straight line tended to work the best, but you can also use your mouse and change the camera viewpoint interactively while the hyperlapse is playing.
For the true geeks out there, Teehan+Lax says the source code is available online, free for the tweaking to make some really nifty videos, like the one below, which was made by one of the people from the agency.
