Here is a VR walkthrough of the Branson location:
And here is a video from last year of their original location in Springfield:
One of these locations has the coolest bathroom in the world.
The other just has a boring bathroom.
Explain it to me like I am five…
Every time I think I have figured out what Google Street View expects, I encounter a new problem. This time, I have a file that Google says has gaps in the GPS data:
But the problem is, I have already tried to fix this multiple times using tools like gpsbabel. This command line utility will create in-between points at the rate you specify. You can use a value of 1 second and get a point every second in the entire GPX file.
Using GPX Editor on the Mac lets me inspect the tracking points. If I sort by duration value, the longest value in the entire file is 4 seconds:
Yet, Google claims there is a 7 second gap after 9 seconds. Looking at the points in time order shows this is not the case: (But do note, this GPS starts sooner than the video; so the points I show here may be from time before the video begins. This does not change the issue, since there is nothing reported longer than 4 seconds in the entire file, anywhere.)
Anyone care to explain why this happens and how I can fix it? I have gotten every other file I have uploaded to work just fine, except for these two I have been working on since last week.
Even when I run gpsbabel with a 1 second “gap” between each point, I still get this type of error.
What else is Google looking for? Web searches and even chatting with Google’s Gemini A.I. have not produced anything helpful.
Comments appreciated…
Here are some comparison videos I recorded last weekend at Silver Dollar City theme park. I mounted both cameras side-by-side and rode their water-based dark ride, The Flooded Mine. Both cameras were recording in 360 video using the low light mode. I then reframed each to a 4K forward view to make this split screen.
There are two segments to this video. One shows them top/bottom, then the video is repeated side-by-side so you can see more of the horizontal and vertical image.
Next is a test of the single lens mode. The X5 was recording in 4K, and the Osmo 360 has some higher 5K-6K resolution mode. For the comparison video, 4K was used so the Osmo is scaled down to fit. This is a walk through Grandfather’s Mansion:
And a week before this, I visited Lost Island Themepark in Waterloo, Iowa. I was recording the indoor queue to their dark ride, Volcano. I was not intentionally doing a comparison of the two cameras, but I did record it twice, each time using a different camera. I put a short clip together showing this:
More to come… Let me know what comparisons you are interested in seeing.
On Friday I received my DJI OSMO 360 camera from B&H Photo here in the U.S.A. I took it out on a test ride with my Insta360 X5 next to it to try to capture some comparison video. Unfortunately, the quality coming out of the Osmo 360 was inferior, and I learned it defaulted to “Standard” bitrate but had a setting for “High.” Since my X5 was set to “High” bitrate, I believe my first comparison would not have been a fair on.
Because of that, I will be re-doing these tests again, soon.
I also took both the X5 and Osmo 360 to Lost Island Themepark in Waterloo, Iowa yesterday. While I did not do any head-to-head comparisons, I did use the Osmo 360 a few times under low light conditions. It is my understanding that it is a better 360 camera for low light.
I will begin sharing these to my Sub-Etha Software YouTube channel, shortly.
Earlier this week, I read (on REDDIT, I think) about 1.5.6 being released. I checked my X5 and it reported nothing new. I checked again, still nothing. But today, something. If you are the type that likes to update immediately, go for it. Else, give it a week and see if any others have problems with it.
Yesterday, I received a notification from B&H Photo that they had the DJI Osmo 360 camera in stock. Indeed, it seems true, at least at the time of this writing:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?q=DJI%20Osmo%20360&sts=ma
This is surprising, since DJI‘s own website has yet shown the item as order-able, at least for folks viewing from the USA.
Meanwhile, Amazon has the camera for sale, but it is through a third-party reseller. Even with it “Shipped by Amazon,” buyers should beware. If this item was not going to be sold in the USA, some reseller could have ordered them from another region to resell here in the States (via eBay, Amazon, etc.). Without knowing if warranties would be honored when purchased this way, or if warranty service/support was possible, I was not willing to order from that reseller. (They may be fine and great, though. I am just speculating.)
So, if you are looking for a well-established place to buy a DJI Osmo 360 in the USA, maybe start with B&H Photo. I have used them a number of times over the past decades, and have yet to have a problem.
Good luck!
Insta360 has been doing a good job at rolling out firmware updates lately.
When capturing video for Google Street View, Google recommends using 1 frame per second video for walking, and 5 frames per second for biking and lower speeds. A full 30 or even 60 fps video is unnecessarily huge and will take much longer to upload and process … and most of the frames will be discarded by Google anyway.
I had one of the A.I.s (probably CoPilot) automate using the ffmpeg open source command line tool so I could batch convert files in a directory. A very rough work-in-progress version is on my GitHub now:
I have noticed the A.I.s are starting to put emojis in things — including code and scripts they generate!
I don’t even know how to type emojis in uMacs or VI ;-) but apparently they are supported these days.
Have you noticed the increase in emojis in A.I. responses lately?
I’d end this post with an emoji, but I do not know how to type one in WordPress . . .
UPDATE: There is now a third party reseller offering the DJI Osmo 360 on Amazon, but shipping doesn’t happen until mid-September. Since this is not Amazon shipping or an official DJI storefront, buyer beware. Check reseller ratings before ordering anything.
UPDATE #2: More “confirmation” as I check out Facebook posts. I keep seeing posts from folks who have had access to pre-release review units saying “not available in the US for the foreseeable future.” That is unfortunate. It looks like the Osmo 360 might be better for low-light 360 and I’d get one just for that.
UPDATE #3: According to this REDDIT post, which includes a chat response from DJI, there is no official sale of the DJI Osmo 360 in the USA at this time. BUYER BEWARE of any third party sellers offering it in the USA.
This morning at 7am central time, DJI officially launched their new DJI OSMO 360 camera. But, like almost everything else on the DJI website, it is unavailable in the U.S.A.
This situation was predicted by many DJI followers, based on how almost nothing they sell is currently available to purchase in the U.S.A. Basically no drones, no cameras, and no microphones are being sold to the U.S.A. currently.
The reasons speculated by video bloggers are varied, and are all based on speculation. The two top speculations I have seen include:
Thus, my goal of getting one of these on launch day will be delayed while we figure out if we can get them at all. Instead of a pre-order or long delivery window, they just say “out of stock.” But so does most other things I have spot-checked on the website.
The FOMO is real!
If you get one here in the U.S.A., please leave a comment and tell us where and how you got it. This isn’t even listed on Amazon… yet.
More to come…
Updates:
Recently I posted a list of Google Street View upload errors I have received. I found a way to deal with one of them.
After some “research” (which you can assume means “googling” and “asking A.I.”) I learned that there can be gaps in GPS data that make the movement appear to spike. I found a Mac Store program called GPX Editor which I purchased for the wonderful price of $4.99 so I could look at the data closer:
This program allowed me to look at my data in a much finer (i.e. zoomed in) way than Google Maps does. I could see spikes in the data that looked as if I suddenly popped to another location, as if I went from walking to zooming at 17 mph. This may have been caused by a GPS glitch as I walked under a bridge or some other obstacle that affected the GPS reading.
While you are looking at that screen shot, notice on the right side you can see how much time there is between GPS entries. Google Street View wants 5 seconds or less, I believe, so when gaps appear at 8 seconds, that will also cause an error and the GPX file will be rejected.
Google wants real GPS data, but it seems fixing an obvious glitch like this should be acceptable. Basically, just moving a point back to where it was. I am sure there are tools like GPX Editor that would allow moving one point and fixing it.
But I am lazy, and wondered if there was an easier way.
I ended up looking for a tool to interpolate the GPS data. Here is the one I found:
https://github.com/remisalmon/gpx-interpolate
It will read a GPX file and then smooth out the points. Here is the example screen shot from that Github repository:
The black dots are actually GPS entries, and the red is where it can create new entries. For slow data, such as walking, this should work really well. And, I notice it has the ability to limit how often the data ends up in the file:
usage: gpx_interpolate.py [-h] [-r RES] [-n NUM] [-s] FILE [FILE ...]
interpolate GPX files using piecewise cubic Hermite splines
positional arguments:
FILE GPX file
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-r RES, --res RES interpolation resolution in meters (default: 1)
-n NUM, --num NUM force point count in output (default: disabled)
-s, --speed save interpolated speed
Side note: To get this running, I had to install a few other things. In order to install them, I had to use some a “virtual environment” for Python so the stuff I installed was isolated from the Python that came with macOS (or so I think). Here were the commands I ran:
cd Movies ***OR WHEREVER YOU WANT TO INSTALL THIS***
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install gpxpy
pip3 install numpy
pip3 install scipy
After that, I could “python3 gpx_interpolate.py -r 1 my_gpx_file.gpx” and get the interpolated file.
The instructions I used (from Google’s A.I.) said I would need to “source venv/bin/activate” each time I started a Terminal and wanted to use this. I will update this as I learn more and understand what this is all about.
Perhaps I could use the “-r” option so it drops a marker every 1 meter or so. As long as I was walking at a regular pace, that should make new data that is much smoother without the jumps and gaps.
This file now seems to have much more consistent entries, and still follows the walking path closely.
I was able to upload the video file and this new interpolated GPX file and it is now live on Google.
But I am sure we can do better. To be continued…