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Camera Vans To Photograph 50 Million Buildings
dritan writes "A new van unveiled at CeBIT America is equipped with 50 digital cameras and takes pictures every 15 feet -- with the goal of photographing 50 million buildings in the country. These photos could be cross-referenced with aerial photographs so that law enforcement or insurance agencies can get overhead and street level views of the same location -- just by entering an address." Time to hang out the "Hi, Mom!" signs.
is it legal?
It'd be interesting to see how such a survey affects sites like MapQuest... as it'd be real useful to have the building you're drving to circled on a street-level picture when you're traveling in an unknown-to-you metro area.
"Still, this would be a great way to find out who has lawn gnomes, plastic flamingos, and those fat-lady-bending-over things in their gardens.
Funny, but you make a very good point. Should this database leak into the "wrong hands" that has access to a competent programmer, targeted robberies could increase. Cross correlations are you friend. Get enough RAM and find the neighborhoods with new sports cars and a little more research and in one night a crew can have at it. Who knew theft could be so efficient?
Burn Hollywood Burn
A year or so ago, Cook County officials sent a van around photographing every house and residential street in the county. They planned to offer the pictures on the internet, but I'm not sure how successful they were.
And yes, it made the news and raised a lot of controversy, but in the end, Cook County told its critics they could shove it, and went ahead and did it anyway.
I guess its just another case of "Can't fight City Hall"....
Now, if a private citizen had attempted to do the same, you can bet they would have been arrested. And if someone tried to do it now, they'd get thrown in jail as a suspected terrorist.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
They may need more vans.
In Allegheny County, PA, you can go to the county assessment website (http://www2.county.allegheny.pa.us/RealEstate/Sea rch.asp)
and search on street name, address, OWNER, etc. In the information for most houses are also the pictures of said house. So this is nothing really new, at least around here.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
I think many municipalities (including my own) already have a freely available, online database of home and landowners, complete with curbside photos. Other information is available in hard form, you need only to go to the town records repository and ask. This isn't really new.
In my experience, thieves are generally pretty poor at what they do, though I'm sure there are a few adept ones. They do their "site surveys" on foot and take the most useless and worthless stuff. E.g. burglars stole my shitty stereo (w/o the faceplate), my cds and $20 binoculars, but they left a (very portable) $400 unicycle in the back seat. The parts could easily have been stripped and sold to BMXers for way more than the other stuff.
Link it to map quest. Driving directions could be visual.
Turn left here: [picture of the intersection]
Render them together, and you could have a 3d rendering of the trip (made up of 2d images used as a textures). On star could send them to your heads-up-display (you have one, right?)
Several French cities, including Paris, are available at www.pagesjaunes.fr (France Telecom's yellow pages). I used it to see the building in Bordeaux where my brother had found an appartment, and to check out the hospital where I was born according to my birth certificate, etc... fun.
b ruit/default.ASP also gives you a 3d map of the amount of street noise received by each building. Useful before you buy an apartment.
On the City of Paris' website http://www.paris.fr/FR/Environnement/bruit/carto_
Well, for starters, what happens when your house isn't blue anymore with tan trim...and the fire truck drives past your house? Given how much of a pain in the ass it is to do the photos, do they honestly intend to update the DB constantly?
Out in western MA, they had a very easy solution to all this. The town gave out bright plastic signs with a picture of a fire truck and the street number of the house...and a little metal stake to hang it from. Instructions on where to place it relative to -your- driveway were given. This was done because many people don't have mailboxes(they have PO boxes in town), or they were confusingly located(ie across the street, at the end of a private driveway, etc).
Works perfectly. This is just some urban idiot who doesn't understand that the problem's already been solved- just not everyone has chosen to implement it.
Please help metamoderate.
I read a claim that when it comes to navigation, men's minds are more spacially oriented while women's minds are more landmark oriented. Thus, maps work better for men than for women.
Women can make due with written directions, but what if there was a way to give directions by providing a photograph of every intersection from the 1st person, with the turns marked by arrows? Instead of memorizing street names or distances, you could just say "I'll turn when I see this, I'll turn when I see that..." You could be completely illiterate and still navigate. To make such a system possible, you'd have to photograph every intersection from every approach, at day and night, every season (which is frequent enough to account for new construction in most areas). It would be very labor intensive, but it would provide a very valuable service. Assuming illiterate, map-incompetent people have enough money to pay for it.
there are 2.27+ million miles of paved roads in the US, not to mention all the unpaved ones...
First off, even at 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day, it'd take about 8 1/2 years to take the photos.
Second, taking 50 pictures every fifteen feet comes to ~17 thousand pictures per mile. Even at a measly 1 megapixel each, that's 17gigs per mile. Multiply that by a couple million miles and I think you may have just a little storage and database problem....