Building Movie Map - A Tool for Exploring Areas in a City - and its Evaluations

We propose a new Movie Map, which will enable users to explore a given city area using omnidirectional videos. Only one Movie Map prototype was developed in the 1980s; it was developed with analog video technology. Later, Google Street View (GSV) provided interactive panoramas from positions along streets around the world in Google Maps. Despite the wide use of GSV, it provides sparse images of streets, which often confuses users and lowers user satisfaction. Movie Map's use of videos instead of sparse images dramatically improves the user experience. Thus, we improve the Movie Map using state-of-the-art technology. We propose a new Movie Map system, with an interface for exploring cities. The system consists of four stages; acquisition, analysis, management, and interaction. In the acquisition stage, omnidirectional videos are taken along streets in target areas. Frames of the video are localized on the map, intersections are detected, and videos are segmented. Turning views at intersections are subsequently generated. By connecting the video segments following the specified movement in an area, we can view the streets better. The interface allows for easy exploration of a target area, and it can show virtual billboards of stores in the view. We conducted user studies to compare our system to the GSV in a scenario where users could freely move and explore to find a landmark. The experiment showed that our system had a better user experience than GSV.