Photo: Google Maps via reddit user zegorn
Glitches in Google’s Street View aren’t necessarily something new, but what you see here is probably the cleanest you’ve come across so far.
This six-wheeled Range Rover Sport was spotted on the streets of Toronto, and the Google systems made such a good job stitching together the captured street-level imagery that the car looks as if someone edited it in Photoshop.
According to information posted on Google Maps, the Street View images of the area were last updated in May 2019, so given the photo set is quite new, don’t expect a refresh anytime soon.
As we said earlier, these glitches are very common in Google Maps and are caused by the systems that created street-level panoramas using the photos captured by Street View cars.
The panoramas are automatically generated by stitching together a series of images that sometimes overlap, and this is why you sometimes end up seeing people with no heads, trees floating in the air, or cars with six wheels.
Google has a more technical explanation as to why these glitches occur from time to time in Street View:
“The creation of these panoramas is a complicated process, involving capturing images from a multi-camera rig called a rosette, and then using image blending techniques to carefully stitch them all together. However, many things can thwart the creation of a ‘successful’ panorama, such as mis-calibration of the rosette camera geometry, timing differences between adjacent cameras, and parallax. And while we attempt to address these issues by using approximate scene geometry to account for parallax and frequent camera re-calibration, visible seams in image overlap regions can still occur.”
Google says it’s now using an updated algorithm for the stitching process, which should make such glitches less common, bug given how much data Street View currently bundles, it’ll probably take many years until all panoramas are seamless on Google Maps.
According to information posted on Google Maps, the Street View images of the area were last updated in May 2019, so given the photo set is quite new, don’t expect a refresh anytime soon.
As we said earlier, these glitches are very common in Google Maps and are caused by the systems that created street-level panoramas using the photos captured by Street View cars.
The panoramas are automatically generated by stitching together a series of images that sometimes overlap, and this is why you sometimes end up seeing people with no heads, trees floating in the air, or cars with six wheels.
Google has a more technical explanation as to why these glitches occur from time to time in Street View:
“The creation of these panoramas is a complicated process, involving capturing images from a multi-camera rig called a rosette, and then using image blending techniques to carefully stitch them all together. However, many things can thwart the creation of a ‘successful’ panorama, such as mis-calibration of the rosette camera geometry, timing differences between adjacent cameras, and parallax. And while we attempt to address these issues by using approximate scene geometry to account for parallax and frequent camera re-calibration, visible seams in image overlap regions can still occur.”
Google says it’s now using an updated algorithm for the stitching process, which should make such glitches less common, bug given how much data Street View currently bundles, it’ll probably take many years until all panoramas are seamless on Google Maps.
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