Haven’t tried Google Street Views? You should! That’s a practical way to teleport and also a nice way to travel around the world virtually for free.

[asides: if you're already a street view fan, did you tried that 8-bit version? and if you've tried that, what about google's version of photosynth?]

Let me highlight a couple of innovative projects that came to my attention utilizing street views.

1. cinemascapes - street view photography

beautiful images (with post processing of course) captured using street views around the world. take a look.

[asides:
9 eyes has a similar approach, with a different style. street view fun is kind of the paparazzi version. so do you really think your iphone is the best street photography camera?
]

2. Address Is Approximate – stop-motion video

Creative and beatiful stop motion film using street views. Watch it!! (some may be reminded of the cinematography in Limitless)

[asides:
"Address is Approximate" was brilliantly executed but there's no harm to trying it yourself. like this]

3.Chemin Vert – interactive 360 video

Look around while being on a train travelling at 1500km/h, across five continents and four seasons. You need webgl + and a decent pc + gpu for this. Try the “HI-FI” version if you have lots of patience waiting for the video to load, and for your browser to crash. And the vimeo version if you like the little planets projections.

And if you’re are like me, watching the (un)projected video source is great enough. hifi version

[asides: though, the first time i saw this technique being employed was in thewildernessdowntown, which i think mrdoob and thespite worked on, see next point]

4. thespite’s Experiments – interactive meshups

Cool experiments by thespite shows that he has been doing such street view meshups with three.js for some while now. What’s better now is that he has just released his Street Views panorama library on github! Fork it!

[asides: thespite's a nice guy who gave me the permission to use GSVPano.js even before releasing it]

5. Honorable mention – stereographic street views

Stereographic Streetviews is an open source project which produces stereographic (aka “little planets”) views. Uses the power of graphic cards for processing, and allows you to easily customize the shader for additional post-processing.

[asides: some of the post-processing filters are quite cool. and some have others have also created videos with this]

So why I’m writing this? Course I think they are brilliant ideas which I could have thought of but would never get to execute them (like a meshup of GSVPano with renderflies).

Anything else I’m missing? Otherwise, hope to see great new street view projects and I’ll try working on mine. Have a good time on the streets!