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Comment by jefft255 | Hacker News Reader

That's doesn't properly look like lidar data to me; at least it wouldn't be lidar that is mounted right on the street view car. Maybe they use aerial lidar somehow? Or maybe the resolution is purposefully poor?

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It is not proper pointclouds, but it is the data used by Street view to highlight if you are looking at a wall, or at a street. It is also used for transitions between one scene to another.

You can see it is very basic 90deg angle geometry, instead of actual pointclouds. Still pretty cool! https://imgur.com/a/EgC0RbN

FWIW, that's just my own amateurish rendering of the points. The data itself that the Street View API provides is just an array of 3d points.

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to come off as judgemental or nitpicky. This is fantastic work! And this data can actually be pretty useful, let's say if somebody wanted to build a racing game based on street view, using the boundaries of the street for collisions etc. Too many fun possibilities!

Not at - I knew what you meant :)

Someone used it years ago to make a neat visualization where they rendered the Street View imagery as normal and then used the same 3D data to overlay foliage and create an apocalyptic environment. Seems to be gone now but there are some articles about it like this one: https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/03/epic-google-street-view...

Since the word 'lidar' can be taken out of the title without damaging it, I've done so. (Submitted title was "Show HN: Street View Simple – Explore Street View Lidar Data in a Browser")

Understood but I think it might be LiDAR - perhaps just an early or unusual implementation? Plenty of articles out there like this one: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/googles-street-view-... that mention a particular LiDAR scanner Velodyne VLP-16 "Puck" - anyhow, doesn't make much difference and thank you for posting why it was changed.

Yeah, this definitely doesn't look like lidar data... unless its really low quality. The buildings show spatial depth, but the cars and pedestrians are pretty much all in a circle (they have no depth).

Interesting - I've seen it touted as LiDAR data but since it's all a bit unofficial, I guess it could be anything. I'll see if I can dig up any old articles about it - it's been there for quite some time.

I don't know much about lidar but.. is it possible Google have done this intentionally with some sort of algorithm? After all, pedestrians and vehicles are just "noise" in the context of mapping/visualising streets.

I think they have removed the cars from the lidar on purpose as there would be privacy issues if the cars were shown. Same would apply for pedestrians and shop facades.

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