Movie Map for Virtual Exploration in a City

Abstract

This paper introduces our work on a Movie Map, which will enable users to explore a given city area using 360° videos. Visual exploration of a city is always needed. Nowadays, we are familiar with Google Street View (GSV) that is an interactive visual map. Despite the wide use of GSV, it provides sparse images of streets, which often confuses users and lowers user satisfaction. Forty years ago, a video-based interactive map was created - it is well-known as Aspen Movie Map. Movie Map uses videos instead of sparse images and seems to improve the user experience dramatically. However, Aspen Movie Map was based on analog technology with a huge effort and never built again. Thus, we renovate the Movie Map using state-of-the-art technology. We build a new Movie Map system with an interface for exploring cities. The system consists of four stages; acquisition, analysis, management, and interaction. After acquiring 360° videos along streets in target areas, the analysis of videos is almost automatic. Frames of the video are localized on the map, intersections are detected, and videos are segmented. Turning views at intersections are synthesized. By connecting the video segments following the specified movement in an area, we can watch a walking view along a street. The interface allows for easy exploration of a target area. It can also show virtual billboards in the view.