Panoramic photos for hockey championship guests in Minsk

Panoramic photos will help guests of the ice hockey world championship in Minsk to find their bearings, including ways to the top sport arenas, BelTA learned from Nikolai Kalashnikov, head of the geoinformation content group of the Russian Internet company Yandex.

Yandex is implementing a pilot project in Minsk to make interior panoramic photos. The company is going to make panoramic photos of Chizhovka Arena and Minsk Arena. By May the photos will become available on the Internet. Anyone, who arrives in Minsk, will be able to find these sport venues, see what they look like inside, where seats are located, and where parking lots are.

The company has plans for renewing all the panoramic photos of Minsk. “The city changes a lot, new houses get built. Some areas are hard to recognize these days. Therefore, we hope that this season we will be able to greatly renew Minsk’s photos,” said Nikolai Kalashnikov.

The first panoramic photos of Minsk were made in 2010. It took some work to process the photos, therefore, the first photos were published in 2011. Now Yandex intends to film at least 1,000km of Minsk streets in about 30,000 panoramic photos, including about 300 photos in Chizhovka.

Street panoramas represent a service that allows Internet users to go on virtual tours of cities. Thousands of photos are taken to make the city look like a real one. Individual plans are made for every populated locality. For instance, in large cities it is necessary to take photos of the city’s center, all the key streets, and places of interests in the suburbs. Panoramic photos are made every 20-50 meters usually and every 20-30 meters in a city downtown. Individual photos are then compiled into panoramas.

Now Yandex panoramas allow going on virtual tours of Minsk, Vitebsk, Grodno, Gomel, Mogilev, and Brest as well as 300 cities of Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Some places of interest can be viewed both from the inside and the outside.