Google Maps’ Street View function now has a companion: sounds.
A new program from Amplifon, which makes hearing aids, came up with Sounds of Street View, which allows users to join the Web Audio API and Street View. According to Gizmodo, it means that appropriate sounds will follow users as they traverse Street View.
As Gizmodo notes, the program sounds best with headphones as it’s “3D”--when one moves away from a location, the sounds will get more and more faint while new ones will emerge.
“We created a function in JavaScript based upon the haversine formula. The haversine formula is a mathematical formula that returns the distance of two points on a sphere. The sphere in question in the application is the Earth’s surface. The two points in question are the user’s current position and the sound source location. We use the latitude of each of these two points to calculate the distance in meters of how far that sound is from the user,” said Stephen Griffin, who works as a developer for Sounds of Street View.
The feature comes as reports on Monday said that Google’s new driverless cars can’t use the vast majority of roads in the US.
Lee Gnomes, with the MIT Technology Review, wrote that the cars rely entirely too much on maps and detailed data, according to Business Insider.
Chris Urmson, who heads the Google driverless car team, told the publication: “I could contruct a construction zone that could befuddle the car,” basically acknowledging that the cars aren’t really ready yet.
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