Mapillary Timelapse - East Lakeview

Went out and recorded some footage for Mapillary today. Rode around some side streets in Lakeview that don’t have 360 imagery on them and are pretty old. You can watch the timelapse here.

I’ve been using the new Mapillary uploader that supports the GoPro .360 files for a little while and am pretty impressed. Instead of having individual photos that are taken every 2 seconds on the GoPro, you take a timelapse while biking or a video while driving. Mapillary will then process the video, taking individual frames from it every so often and matching it up with the GPS data.

The advantage of this approach is that it’s a loooot simpler for people recording. Timelapse videos take up much less space than hundreds upon hundreds of photos and impact the battery a lot less. They also offer higher interval recording - the GoPro Max only offers 360 timelapse photos at a 2s interval, while video timelapses can have photos taken every half second. You can also level out the footage after you’ve taken it by exporting to a HEVC MP4 with the GPS data encoded. By far my largest complaint with Mapillary is that they don’t do horizon leveling on photos, which makes for an awful experience for mappers. This export approach fixes that, at the expense of lower quality.

The downside of this approach is the lower quality. The photos produced by it tend to appear more compressed, have lower dynamic range, and don’t look that great in shade or preserve details well. If you don’t upload the raw .360 files, the compression Mapillary uses to serve lower-res segments while zoomed out doesn’t play nice with the compression added to the HEVC MP4, leading to 360 photos that look even messier. But if you do import the raw 360 file, Mapillary doesn’t horizon level things, and it still doesn’t look as good as a regular photo.

I recently bought an Insta360 X3, and I have a GPS module coming for it in the mail soon. The X3 has a photo interval mode and I’m interested to see how well it works as an alternative to the Max. The X3 has horizon leveling built in at the camera level (and it’s fantastic) so I’m hoping the photos made by it will look better.