Friday, July 22, 2011

New York Videos on Google Maps


MyBlockNYC is a Google Maps based application that allows users to upload and explore videos documenting the life and culture of New York City.

The site already boasts nearly 1000 videos and videos representing 734 New York City blocks. The blocks that have videos are displayed on the map with yellow roads. If you click on a yellow line you can watch the video directly from the map.

As well as exploring the videos by location you can filter the results by category, by time of day and season, and by the age and sex of the film-maker.

MyBlocNYC

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1 comment:

Interstellar Bill said...

Nobody seems to be aware of the tremendous business opportunity for virtual tourism.

Google Maps lets you clumsily fly over a barely recognizable digital 3D rendering of a locale, but the fascination is unmistakable even so. It makes you imagine a real-time version whereby a local businessman with a camera-drone could supply real-time video to remote viewers.

Nobody has time to go to the thousands of fascinating but obscure places of the world that they'd love to see, but not for the tremendous effort and time of actually going there, whereas a 10-minute spherical-video tour could satisfy a lot of curiosity and enable much more rapid learning about faraway places.

All it needs is bandwidth and economic freedom. Somebody in a tiny Himalyan village, or a remote picturesque island, could make a good living with a smudgeon of video electronics and an Internet micro-payment system, catering to virtual tourists, geography students, and the occasional travel reporter.

The relatively primitive Webcams of today will evolve into full generators of virtual presence, with the added bonus of greater global integration.