Talaash! Which part of Mumbai do you want to see?

Eastern Freeway




Views: Entrance to Eastern Freeway Tunnel Entrance. Chembur End. by Slogan Murugan (Gopal MS)




I am continuing my temporary obsession with a new toy, the Photo Sphere App from Google Maps.

This is the entrance of the Eastern Freeway as you go from the Chembur to the Docks and South Mumbai. It's a mere 10-12 minutes away from here.

Now see this flattened image of the panorama shown above.





And this is the animation that appears of the Little People stitch the many photos one clicks with the camera into an almost seamless panorama. This image when viewed on a site, appears nice and rounded.

Luckily I don't see two moons. That would mean that I have not been transported to 2Q14.

Here is another panorama, a little further up and road and that image has already been approved by the Little People at Google Maps and is on Google Maps! A big Yeah! It gives me the same thrill of images that I clicked and posted on Panoromio, many years back before Google Maps became big.




Views: Eastern Freeway near Shani Mandir/Shivaji Chowk, Chembur. by Slogan Murugan (Gopal MS)

And here is the flattened image of the above view.


And what is the science or the mathematics of these flattened images?

Last week's Mint had a story on the subject and will help us understand the basic principle behind how to flatten an image without having to peel and orange and smash it on your table.

Read Straight Line Fever -  A look at the work of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the prestigious Fields medal for mathematics by Dilip D'Souza.

"Understanding this basic difference between the characteristics of a map and a globe—a flat surface and a curved one—is a small key to understanding the work of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win mathematics’ Fields Medal. The point is, assumptions we make about flat surfaces don’t hold for curved ones. Here’s another: the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, remember? But consider the triangle made by the North Pole, the point where the 0 degree meridian crosses the equator (off the coast of Ghana) and the point where the 90 degree meridian crosses the equator (in the Indian Ocean about 1500km south of the Andamans). All three angles are 90 degrees. Their total: 270 degrees.

Curved surfaces for you. "

Read the whole article here.



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