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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.
Great, now I'll have to wrap my whole house!
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
is it legal?
Oh, great. I just hope when they photograph my house the lawn is mowed and the hedges are trimmed.
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.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
I'll be hanging my "All your base.." sign :)
Moderation: +1 pwnage
I just happen to be an enthusiast of the art of architecture. This would be a great way to look up and view buildings by address/location.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Combined with mapping data can we make levels for our favourite games, with pictures of buildings true to life?
ah, mod points
Think about it...It's Open Source and community based and it would look Great on Film!
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
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.
remove the swastika flags from the vans before they come prowling through my neighborhood?
"When viewed from this angle, all the bare ass cheeks pressed against the windows spell out SCO SUCKS".
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
We *promise* the data won't be used against normal citizens, and *definitely* will not end up in the wrong hands. Double pinky swear... and you know you can trust us, we're the one's that told you about WMD...
meh
I don't mind this at all. They may look at the address I gave them, 1060 W addison, Chicago, any time that they want...
May 25, 2004
Van Could Take Photographs While Driving
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:14 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- An odd-looking van sprouts 13 digital cameras that its builder wants to use to photograph 50 million buildings in the country while driving, taking pictures every 15 feet.
The van's drive-by snaps would be matched against GPS satellite positioning data and aerial photographs in a database. Police, insurance agents and others then could call up overhead and street-level views simply by entering an address.
The setup from Imageos Inc. was one of the security-related exhibits on display at this year's CeBIT America technology trade show, which opened here Tuesday. Other companies were showing software tools to secure wireless networks, monitor employee surfing and protect users from viruses and spyware.
The main market for Imageos' photographs would be insurance appraisals, but the Boulder, Colo., startup is also touting the pictures for ``homeland security'' applications, law enforcement and emergency services.
Imageos' Paul Jurasin said that thanks to the aerial photos, the database can show whether a house has a swimming pool or a fence in the back, details that could be of interest both to insurance companies and police.
``It gives them more information than they would get by driving up to a house, before they get there,'' Jurasin said.
So far, Imageos has photographed only Orlando, Fla. If it gets funding, it plans to photograph the 25 largest cities in the country over the next five years using more than a dozen vans.
Elsewhere on the convention floor, Hewlett-Packard Co. showed a laptop computer that is secured against non-computing attacks, namely water, dust and physical impact. The nr3600 is HP's first ``rugged'' laptop, an entry into a market dominated by Panasonic's Toughbooks.
Rugged laptops are aimed at workers who need to bring their computers to rough construction sites, deserts and combat. The nr3600, on sale now for $4,099 and up, meets military specifications for shock resistance and sealing against the elements. It is joined by a keyboard-less ruggedized ``tablet'' for $600 less.
The nr3600 has a large carrying handle, but for portability, it can't beat the OQO, an ``ultra personal computer'' about the size of a paperback book. The small LCD screen slides away to reveal a tiny keyboard intended for thumb-typing.
It has most of the functionality of a full computer: The Windows XP machine has a hard drive, built-in wireless networking and a USB port.
The OQO is designed for simpler tasks while on the move. When you sit down for serious work, you attach it to a docking station that connects to a full monitor, mouse and keyboard. The OQO thus aims to replace Palm-style organizers, laptops and desktops.
San Francisco-based OQO Inc. has been promising its gadget for two years. It says it's now finally shipping this fall for somewhat less than $2,000.
Nifty gadgets aside, the latest year's upswing in the technology business was in little evidence at show. Organizers expected 350 to 360 exhibitors, slightly fewer than last year, which was the first time CeBIT held an American show.
``It's OK. It's not buzzing with activity, but it's OK,'' said Farhad Keyvan, who was visiting from Bridgewater, N.J., where he runs a small software company.
Mark Dineen, the show's managing director, acknowledged that some large U.S. companies have ``pulled away'' from the trade show business.
However, Microsoft Corp. and enterprise software giants PeopleSoft Inc. and Siebel Systems Inc. were added to the roster of exhibitors this year, and a greater number of preregistrations led organizers to expect up to 50 percent more attendees than the 8,500 that showed up last year. The show runs till Thursday.
CeBIT America is an offshoot of the world's largest technology fair, which is held Hanover, Germany, in March. That show had 6,411 exhibitors this year.
link to a copy of this article hosted by Information Week
Personally I would re-do the buildings after the van passes just to be a pain.
I'll bet that some A$$croft type wants people to stand in front of their homes/buildings as the van passes too.
I'm _still_ looking for a country that won't constantly track me like an animal or invade my privacy like a criminal. I haven't found one yet...
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Because I would think they would run into the problem of pictures coming out poorly, and if they're taking that many there would be no way to check them all. Also, isn't 50 million photos going to take up a crapload of space?
Now how do we keep this out of the hands of the terrorists?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
My house is sheltered from the street by a thick strand of trees and planters. Hopefully the federales will use this information to keep out of my impatiens when they storm my house.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
law enforcement (..) can get overhead and street level views of the same location -- just by entering an address.
Great. Now they'll be sure not to miss that donut shop.
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
There's no new technology here. For all you know, Agent Smith could have walked by your house many times already and taken all the pictures he needed. The real concern here, of course, is that the information/technology isn't abused. But I can't think of a good reason why the use of van-based cameras poses a greater threat to privacy than man-based cameras (oooh, that rhymes! I didn't plan it, I swear!) Cameras are everywhere, and the simple act of giving them wheels doesn't frighten me.
My place isn't likely to be visible to these guys - I'm in a condo, and I'm on the side of the building that doesn't face the street, just the next buildings. MapQuest used to have aerial photos, so I've seen pictures of my roof, and probably a picture of my car's roof, but I don't know if any of the free mapping problems still offer that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Verizon will send its spokesman to accompany them. Every time a picture is taken, that guy will say "Can you hear me now?"
Then, one picture will include his corpse on the front lawn, and James Earl Jones will get his job back.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Article Text: Van Could Take Photographs While Driving By PETER SVENSSON NEW YORK - An odd-looking van sprouts 13 digital cameras that its builder wants to use to photograph 50 million buildings in the country while driving, taking pictures every 15 feet. The van's drive-by snaps would be matched against GPS satellite positioning data and aerial photographs in a database. Police, insurance agents and others then could call up overhead and street-level views simply by entering an address. The setup from Imageos Inc. was one of the security-related exhibits on display at this year's CeBIT America technology trade show, which opened here Tuesday. Other companies were showing software tools to secure wireless networks, monitor employee surfing and protect users from viruses and spyware. The main market for Imageos' photographs would be insurance appraisals, but the Boulder, Colo., startup is also touting the pictures for "homeland security" applications, law enforcement and emergency services. Imageos' Paul Jurasin said that thanks to the aerial photos, the database can show whether a house has a swimming pool or a fence in the back, details that could be of interest both to insurance companies and police. "It gives them more information than they would get by driving up to a house, before they get there," Jurasin said. So far, Imageos has photographed only Orlando, Fla. If it gets funding, it plans to photograph the 25 largest cities in the country over the next five years using more than a dozen vans. Elsewhere on the convention floor, Hewlett-Packard Co. showed a laptop computer that is secured against non-computing attacks, namely water, dust and physical impact. The nr3600 is HP's first "rugged" laptop, an entry into a market dominated by Panasonic's Toughbooks. Rugged laptops are aimed at workers who need to bring their computers to rough construction sites, deserts and combat. The nr3600, on sale now for $4,099 and up, meets military specifications for shock resistance and sealing against the elements. It is joined by a keyboard-less ruggedized "tablet" for $600 less. The nr3600 has a large carrying handle, but for portability, it can't beat the OQO, an "ultra personal computer" about the size of a paperback book. The small LCD screen slides away to reveal a tiny keyboard intended for thumb-typing. It has most of the functionality of a full computer: The Windows XP machine has a hard drive, built-in wireless networking and a USB port. The OQO is designed for simpler tasks while on the move. When you sit down for serious work, you attach it to a docking station that connects to a full monitor, mouse and keyboard. The OQO thus aims to replace Palm-style organizers, laptops and desktops. San Francisco-based OQO Inc. has been promising its gadget for two years. It says it's now finally shipping this fall for somewhat less than $2,000. Nifty gadgets aside, the latest year's upswing in the technology business was in little evidence at show. Organizers expected 350 to 360 exhibitors, slightly fewer than last year, which was the first time CeBIT held an American show. "It's OK. It's not buzzing with activity, but it's OK," said Farhad Keyvan, who was visiting from Bridgewater, N.J., where he runs a small software company. Mark Dineen, the show's managing director, acknowledged that some large U.S. companies have "pulled away" from the trade show business. However, Microsoft Corp. and enterprise software giants PeopleSoft Inc. and Siebel Systems Inc. were added to the roster of exhibitors this year, and a greater number of preregistrations led organizers to expect up to 50 percent more attendees than the 8,500 that showed up last year. The show runs till Thursday. CeBIT America is an offshoot of the world's largest technology fair, which is held Hanover, Germany, in March. That show had 6,411 exhibitors this year.
wdd
From the article:
An odd-looking van sprouts 13 digital cameras that its builder wants to use to photograph 50 million buildings in the country while driving, taking pictures every 15 feet.
heh. you're right. Could have done with out that, and just mentioned "architectural interest" rather than the obvious already-stated way to get there.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Art precedes technology: The Camera Van
And yet, if I take pictures anywhere near a Federal building, subway tunnel or bridge, even from a public sidewalk, the goons will want to catalogue me as a potential threat.
[
Here's a no reg required copy of the AP article.
I
This is interesting, I really don't see how this could be bad, aside from having an ugly house or yard. Actually Europe (more specifically france) has things like this, in their internet yellow pages, there is a picture of every single address. Works great when you are looking for hotels (which is how I found) and want to know what the area looks like.
I can really only see how this can help things, like historical data...how an area looked in a hundred years or something, or with research into an area.
Madrid and Bercelona are alaready online, and most buildings have multiple views.
check it out here. However the site seems to be running very slow at the moment.
For some sample addresses, you can use Calle Serrano 75, or Francisco Silvela 20
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Ok, here's my plan... I'll hang a painting I made on the house with a disclaimer that it's not to be reproduced...
then, after they take the picture, I'll demand access to the content database since I know they have my IP in there...
if they refuse, I'll lobby Congess to pass a law that has the DOJ go after them for me !
Oh yeah, I almost forgot (this is
Step 4: Profit !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
don't have your house wired with fiber optics yet? Too few computers? There Is Help!
So there's this professor at my college (Purdue) who his big research thing is trying to take large numbers of periodically spaced panoramic images within a certain area and stitch together 3D models of a sort out of them that you can move around within freely. Like Quicktime VR, but taken one step further. (His way of approaching the problem is taking the photos really densely over a small area and attempt to reduce things to a database problem, so I don't know how well his specific approach would work with a bunch of more-loosely spaced photos over a large area, but there's a lot of possible approaches to this same problem and the general idea is the same.)
I'd love to get hold of a copy of this van's database. You could do some great things with this. It sounds like it takes pictures in all directions every 15 feet, and then specially saves later the ones that are of the front of a building? If so, that's perfect. Take all the street photos of downtown Seattle from each of the 15 digital cameras every 15 feet, carefully stitch them all together and do some extrapolation, do some manual editing to fill in things like the uncaptured backsides of lightposts and other objects, and bam, you've got a breathtakingly detailed map for use in, say, Half Life 3, or the next Project Gotham racing...
So they're going to be letting law enforcement have this database? I wonder if the Freedom of Information Act still counts for anything...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
not 50 as the author mistakenly reported.
0 525-1257-techshow.html
Also.. this is just an AP article.. Im unsure why a nytimes link was posted.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/2004
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
See, e.g.: Freedom to Photograph site, discussion: "Street photography - stopped by the police?"
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.
How do they maintain this image collection so that it stays up to date? If a single building changes (is modified, demolished, etc.) will they go back and photograph it? Or will they just do huge city sweeps every year or so? I would think they'd be doing the latter. It'd be like a photographic street directory.
OLPC Australia
Wake up call, people. Your house, unless it's behind a fence, is already accessible visually to the public. I can walk out my door right now, with my camera, and snap pictures of every house on my street.
What'll that get me? Not much, except a bunch of pictures of houses on my street.
If this helps the 911 guys find my house better in case of an emergency, good for them. If it never happens, they've got a picture of a blue house with tan trim.
Someone please enlighten me as to how this could possibly be bad.
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."
I always wondered how the operators did that in the Matrix.
They may need more vans.
Oh, sure. Give them a handwriting sample while you're at it.
You know what?
Most houses in Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla and Valencia can be seen on QDQ. You can either click on one of the cities on the map or type in the address
(Spanish quickquide: Nombre de la calle = Street name, Número = Number, Buscar = Search)
As an architect I'm sure you will appreciate looking for Passeig de Gracia 92, Barcelona.
Cheerios,
Peter
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
If this helps the 911 guys find my house better in case of an emergency, good for them. If it never happens, they've got a picture of a blue house with tan trim.
:)
Well, they'll have a convincing case for governmental intervention in the next home decorating decision you make
Seems like you could do this rather easily locally. Get 15 friends, go to fry's, and buy up lots of $0-with-rebate USB cameras, outfit a van, drive around with a GPS and a really nice MySQL-based laptop, a whole new type of wardriving, with a huge hard disk. Could probably set yourself up in business for under $5000- with a junker van or car for the base. And since this company is only planning on doing the 25 largest cities there's plenty of other space to go with. Like the article says- your customers aren't just local law enforcement, but also insurance and mortgage appraisers, and probably even real estate agents. Bet at $.99/pic a website for any area that has a population of more than 100,000 would make a nice living.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Here's the overhead TerraServer for anyone that hasn't seen it before.
I can't quite put my finger on the article in the constitution which permits agents of the government to do this.
Nothing in the constitution says they can't. The outside aspect of a building, as viewed in the visible spectrum, is publicly-available information. There's no legal reason why the government can't make a database of it.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
New facades!
Rotating blind signs for houses!
Huge dot-matrix walls that hook up to your computer, with libraries of building sides to display.
Blinding arrays of floodlights.
Gangs of kids with paint-filled balloons, paid for pasting these vans.
This could be *great* for the economy.
Not that familiar with Barcelona yet. Is that Gaudi's rippled apartment building? Just a guess, as it does not sound like it is the location of Parca Guell or La Sagrada Familia
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Will they drive around saying "Vote Quimby" through a megaphone?
The french already did this - check out pages jaunes (pages jaunes is french for Yellow Pages). You can actually look up an address and see a photo of it.
I'm not quite sure how significant it is to photograph 50 million buildings. Does anyone have a rough idea of how many buildings there are in the U.S.? If the 50 million figure is anywhere near the total number of buildings in the United States, I will be quite impressed. My best guess right now is about 100 million. This is an order of magnitude estimate (yes, I'm a physicist) based on the number of people living in the U.S. (~300 million). Does anyone have a better guess (or, *gasp*, actual information)?
With US journalism (see yesterday's New York Times mea culpa) slowly coming round to admitting that it was duped in the rush to war, we're at a point where that institution's filters can't really be trusted to portray reality. Why not simply put a few of these on the road and let them transmit images back from Iraq?
The American people might be surprised to see the images readily available to the rest of the world of this "liberation."
You're lost on a street. Take a photo with your camera phone and send it to the service. Characteristic image features are used to recognize the buildings, which are cross-referenced with addresses and GPS coordinates in the database. The service tells you where you are and how to get where you're going.
The recognition technology for this application is already in development.
Of course, if your phone is a GPS phone, you might not need this.
--Tom
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
from Bugs Bunny:
Just get a big canvas outside your house, paint a tunnel, and watch what happens!
<insert witty linux comment here>
No, The OQO will be shipping this fall. It's still vaporware until then.
That's Road Runner.
;)
And you don't want a coyote to drive a truck through your front door.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Pennsylvania's Deptartment of Transportation has been building a video log of the major state routes. It's a similar concept, but their implementation is focused on road maintenance and identification rather than address mapping. http://164.156.5.83/ividlog/video_locate.asp
I can't find one thing in the article that says this is being done by the government. This is a private company photographing what is publically visible. My only concern would be for the individuals captured in the frames. Are they going to doctor the images prior to posting them?
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
where i can pick up a REALLY BIG shower curtain?
I was thinking I'd just hang a lifesized painting of someone else's house in front of my house . . .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
in a book of quotations, there was a quote (apparently it wasn't for its humor or wit) where an IRA assassin said "Christ, I'm in the wrong house." I don't know which violent act that referred to, but it doesn't sound like a successful one. Rule one for successful assassins - kill the right person. (Of course, that ignores ST Rule One for assassinations - "kill the assassins." - but that's neither here nor there).
Then we have mishaps such as an elderly preacher in Columbus dying of a heart attack when the police showed up in SWAT gear to bust the wrong house, or the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. The first could have been prevented with data such as that being gathered here.
I can walk out my door right now, with my camera, and snap pictures of every house on my street.
u it.html). That might also get you arrested (I, personally, have been arrested for taking pictures of an industrial plant from a public sidewalk).
What'll that get me? Not much, except a bunch of pictures of houses on my street.
Umm... That is highly likely to get you at least a conversation with cops.
That might also get you sued (see e.g. http://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/laws
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
This will be perfect for terrorists, they will no longer have to scope places out. Just go for a virtual tour.
Jeoin
I bet the guy driving the truck up and down every street in the city spent a lot of time in college.
Technically I'm not doing anything illegal, but that doesn't stop them from driving by every 10 minutes of so and ruining one my shots by hitting me with the spotlight and asking inane questions. So somehow I doubt you could walk around taking pictures of people's houses with impunity
The concern though isn't with the pics themselves, its the fact that its being databased. That opens up a whole new can of worms...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Back in the mumblety-70s there was a short story in one of the science fiction pulps called "Stolzfus's Revenge", about an Amish farmer who got annoyed at Russians and English-speakers doing satellite photographs of his farm, so he started plowing messages to them into his field. He started off with simple lines, but eventually worked his way up to fancier looking fonts. Air traffic was getting diverted to not fly over the fields, and eventually a Yankee spy satellite photographed a farm in the Soviet Union which had "Same To You, Buddy" plowed on it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...that says "Fuck Ashcroft"
"in the country"
Why stop there? No wonder why American kids do so badly in geography and other subjects.
on how many pictures will have a dinosaur?
They said that they'd take pictures every 15 feet. No way will they ever get close to doing 45MPH, more like 2MPH. A LOT more vans are needed.
This is Slashdot! My house has a Cloaking device, designed out of tinfoil, old converse sneakers, and powered by Mountain Dew - It's unstoppable. ..muahahawhahahwhamuahah.
Do you think that they could use this same technology in many cars to automatically photograph signs showing gas prices?
Think, a car drives by a gas station. The camera snaps a picture of the gas prices. The image is uploaded somewhere where the image is processed and the gas price information extracted. You have many cars driving around normally automatically doing this so that you are constantly getting the current information. The location/price is then available to users/drivers (perhaps on their cell phone). So the next time you are out of gas, you could look up on your cell phone and see which local station currently has the best price.
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.
One obvious application is to use the images as texture maps for 3D FPS simulators to train law enforcement or military in virtual urban environments. Just the ticket for training the troops to put down local uprisings. :)
Perhaps... Or maybe it would be a good time to start.
I do the same thing, except the first time a cop rolls by I try to flag him down and explain what I'm doing. Most of them are fairly understanding; I've even had one get out and wave off (minimal) traffic so I could get a good angle on a photo. You'd be surprised how well talking to cops works, especially bored night beat cops. And if you've got one cop car hanging out, other cops will generally leave you alone, presuming brother cop knows what's going on.
I see no concern with the databasing; so anyone can cross-index a house adress with its frontal appearance - nothing they couldn't do by driving up in front of it.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
If the public had access to this, there could be some neat applications. Courier companies could send a picture of the residence to a screen in their trucks. Realtors could put up a photo listing of a new house, with one phone call from the owner. Could be interesting.
They can enter an address and get a picture of your house. Okay, so what.
Throw in some image-recognition software and some serious hardware, and it's possible to find your address using a picture of your house.
Now put that power in the hands of the public. You have a flamewar with an internet troll. Troll goes to your blog, gets the picture of your kitten which happens to show enough of your house for the system to pick out the unique characteristics. Troll is now on their way to your house.
I'll admit it; that's a fair stretch of the imagination. Highly unlikely, but if this could possibly be bad in any way, I have faith that some idiots will figure out how.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
coat your house in mirrors
In practice it's not that simple - your site http://www.highways.org/states.cfm?category=FedAid is for highways that get Federal aid, which includes most of the long-haul roads, but not a lot of city streets, which is where most of the buildings are.
On the other hand, if most of the 50 million buildings are in reasonably dense areas (20-200 buildings per mile), that'd be 2.5m - 0.25m miles, so that's still in the ballpark for photographing most of them quickly. (Typical suburban /small-town houses are on lots 50-100 feet wide on both sides of the road, so that's 100-200 per mile, and typical urban blocks are 10 to the mile, so 20 block-sized buildings or many more smaller buildings.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Maybe Fedex Ground could use this to find out what my house looks like. They keep delivering to the wrong house, even though I have the street number over the door and on the curb. They probably wouldn't be able to find my house to take the picture though.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I would love to drive around in a GTA world that's actually in my home town Louisville, KY.
I could drive into Churchhill Downs, Go by the Louisville Slugger museum and try to blow up the giant bat.
Drive up to my own house and run into my local bar with out the worries of going to jail for the killings.
Great stress reliever.
--------- Steve Martin once said, "Sex is the most natural, most beautiful, most wonderful thing that money can buy."
There is one thing that frustrates me when getting directions from sites such as mapquest or mapblast. While I get the directions, it can be very confusing once you're actually in the car and trying to make snap decions on the fly. Has anyone had the problem where you're looking for the street sign only to pass it because it was hidden from view? Now what if this photo van could be used to map out certain sections of a large, metro area like New York, LA, or San Francisco? Wouldn't it be nice to go online and actually see some pictures of intersections so you know what to look for? Even cooler would be a virtual drive of the route you will take using the information taken from these photo vans. How cool would that be?
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Doesn't that cross over some privacy laws? On the other hand, might that not also break some indecency laws considering what some people like to do in front of open windows? Man! Someone is going to have to look through a lot of pictures of naked men masturbating in front of their computers. ;) hehe
Who is Twirlip of the Mists?
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.
Your house, unless it's behind a fence, is already accessible visually to the public. I can walk out my door right now, with my camera, and snap pictures of every house on my street.
This is common privacy logic ("The information is public, and all I'm doing is databasing it"), but it's incorrect.
Laws regarding privacy were produced in an environment *without* computers and en-masse databasing. For example, a phone book contains publically available data. On a computer, it's the work of a few seconds to sort and reverse. However, reverse phonebooks were traditionally considered invasive of privacy, and restricted to people like police. In the era of computers, anyone can have a reverse phone book.
When we decide that any pictures can be taken from public locations because, given the environment fifty years ago, there was no privacy violation, we cannot extrapolate to today's environment. If I use the growing number of camera feeds available and use image recognition to build up a map, I can track people's whereabouts throughout the day.
May we never see th
To paint the lyrics of a particular song by NWA all over the sides of my home!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
i wonder if they'll make a spangley 3d model. if they license it out to game companies, it could pave the way for some cool new 3d games. think GTA6, in a real places
It would be totally fine. You are allowed to photograph thigns in public, including houses. You can't go in those houses and take pictures without permission, but photographing the outside is just fine.
Some groups have already done things like this. A husband/wife team with money and a private helicopter went and photographed the California coastline, including the houses there. The authorities were fine with that. Now BArbra Streistand raised a stink over her house being photographed and has sued for invasion of privacy, but has no chance of winning. City hall, however, hasn't even said anything as they just don't care.
Go to yellowpages then click on les photos de villes, pick a city, type in the address and look at the building ! I've always wondered what was the point for them to do that, I guess they had money to spare...
IANWYTIA (I Am Not Who You Think I Am)
Am I expecting them to drop in any minute? Will I do it anyhow?
if this has any bad effect on people living in houses, it would be the first "official" thing that did something good to homeless people.
beer as in "free beer"
Place a design on your building and claim copyright. Or any other building for that matter.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Why not just use a plane or satellite?
This application is perfect for line scan cameras. They take a continuous image one frame at a time, where each "frame" is one pixel wide and the sensor height (say, 2000 pixels) high. The "proper" frame rate depends on the speed of the van, but since there are cameras capable of capturing NASCAR races in high resolution (at 10,000 frames per second) I don't think the speed of the van would be an issue. It is analagous to using a handheld scanner to scan the world as it goes by.
With line scan, there is no issue of blurr from the motion of the van. If the frame rate is too slow you'll get a lower resolution (and horizontally compressed) image, but it isn't blurred. With traditional 2D photography you'd either have to drive slow, use a high shutter speed, or both, to avoid blurr. Plus, you will inevitably get overlap of pictures and then need to "stitch" them back together with software.
With line scan, the image is continuous. The user could simply hit a button at the end of every block and "cut" the image at that point for convenience. Or, a single picture could be taken of the entire length of a road, no matter how long.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that makes line scan cameras for sports timing.
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....
I wonder if it will get to 2 Columbus Circle before this beautiful building gets an awful facelift.
You are very naive. There will be no presidential elections in November:
You cannot get any more direct than that. Knowing what happened on March 14 in Spain, and why, the intended course of action of Ashcroft & co. is pretty much obvious...
And don't count on Congress or the Supreme court to stop them! Parliamentary immunity can be cancelled if the MP or senator is a suspected terrorist!
There's been an "ice cream" van circling my streets for the last few weeks.
:-P
Coincidence? I think not.
It was a really good paper.
According to the blurb on their website, the van does more than just take pictures. It also builds a 3D model as it goes.
the initial data set for The Matrix is born.
Anybody want a peanut?
The New York MTA was banning photos in the subway and this critter is a lot worse.
Look for a document from Tom Ridge.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
...building codes would often prevent building a subterrainian home...
Really? I don't know of any codes that prevent a basement in a house (unless it's a flood area). So, what you do is build a regular house, make the basement your primary living quarters, and have the upstairs completely empty (i.e., no appliances, limited fixtures, just enough to get an occupancy permit), then use the main floor for the purposes you'd normally use your basement for (i.e., storage, junk, etc).
Check out the databases of several digitized French and Spanish cities, including Paris and Madrid. The stuff also has a navigation system, so you can literally walk around digitally.
The company who did this, the Société de Numérisation des Villes, as far as I can remember, had 20 photographs walking through every street in Paris during 6 months to start up the database. The database was kept current by regularly checking the city records of building authorizations. Now they're part of a bigger company, so who knows what will happen next.
I can't tell you how cool this thing is when you're looking for an apartment. "What's the address? Oh, it's that kind of building. Forget it then."
Someone please enlighten me as to how this could possibly be bad.
The cost of such a project is huge.
The benefits of such a project is minor.
Ergo: Waste of money.
If the supply of resources is infinite, then this wouldn't be a problem.
However, we are living in the real world, and there are other things that this money could be spent on.
For 911, we could be investing into 911 infrastructure -- call centers, dispatching, maps, etc. Or we could invest this money into healthcare -- low-cost loans for medical and nursing students, hospital expansions, etc. Or perhaps into more police staff, etc.
For terrorism, we could be spending the money in the former USSR, tracking where the Soviet biological and radioactive weapons are. We could spend that money securing said weapons. Or we could spend that money luring more Arabic translators into our intelligence services.
I pay my taxes -- I care how they are spent!
... where we can track the van's location via GPS? I figure since they're going to be driving by taking pictures of us, we should at least know where they're going.
If that many cameras are taking pictures every 15 feet they'll end up with enough data, combined with aerial photos, to do some awesome 3-D modeling of these cities.
I can think of dozens of fun applications that could use this database.
If I were in canada I'd hang out a copyright notice. They allow copyright on buildings. Of course you could display a copyrighted image prominently - have mural (sp?) on the front of your house even in the US to get the same effect - making their image an illegal copy.
I hope they have fun photographing the wall in front of my property!
An environmental group already built a database of houses along the California coastline to prove that homeowners were building without permits or blocking public access to beaches, a mjor political issue. It annoyed Barbara Streisand so much that she sued, but lost.
signature pending slashdot approval
Read Amendment 9 to the COTUS. Any right not directly given to the government is retained by the People or the States.
Not that we've followed that amendment for the past century or so...
At any rate, time to go buy some pink dinosaurs...
All's true that is mistrusted
In my town, I periodically get advertisements to have my street number painted on the sidewalk curb for the same purpose.
bananas like monkeys.
Yeah. Clinton had one of those moments too when he blew up an aspirin factory where he thought bin Laden was making chemical weapons. Or the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
If you check out the pic on their web page your find an address on Deer Creek Dr. in Orlando FL. Some more searching on the Orange County Property Appraisal site leads to an ID of the name and address. Unfortunately, the picture doesn't match the address. It is on a different street (Dikerson Lane), about 10 houses away. I wonder how these people would feel about being used as an example?
Unneccessary. I could send you photos (har har har) of houses that people were going to build.. and then they ran out of money after just putting in a full basement (required in my area.. Maine.. brr that's cold). They just slap a half tall roof on the property, put in a nice entry way, and call it a day.
There is no reason that it couldn't be hidden with some shrubbery, or even sunked a few feet deeper and a submarine style entrance attached.
but Hi mom ?!?! How about just off-setting the street addresses on a random block :) Would love to see them try and reconcile the 2 views :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's going to be fun looking up houses 50 years from now and still seing "FUCK BUSH" posters in the windows.
I meant, of course, the 10th amendment, not the 9th. The 9th is equally interesting in that it says the enumeration of certain individual rights shall not be construed to disparage rights not enumerated (totally pulling the rug out from under the "right to privacy isn't in the Constiution" people.
All's true that is mistrusted
It's already public information, is the point. Anything else is a matter of degree; what exactly are you worried that they are going to do with your photo amongst one hundred thousand, obtained via database, that they wouldn't be able to do with just your photo, obtained by driving by?
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
http://www.geocities.com/afpurity/
Now you're not even allowed to conduct cancer prevention excercises in you're own home. Or someone elses home. Or the next door neighbours garage.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Unfortunately, building codes would often prevent building a subterrainian home.
Dude, If you're building a secret underground bunker so you can hide from insurance companies and law enforcement the first thing you do is not apply to the government for permission.
Sheesh! Get with the program.
KFG
Time to hang out the "Hi, Mom!" signs.
Nah! A "Cops and Insurance Agents suck!" banner would be so much better.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
A bit hard to navigate, though...
GTA America, now we can make games based on real cities. I think this is a great idea.
A few weeks ago, I walked to the Post Office to return a DVD to Netflix. After I dropped off my mail, I decided to take some photos of the building. Then, I took a 360 degree panarama from a neighboring empty field, and I took some close-up shots of some flowers growing in the field. Then, I walked back home.
I reached the school zone that runs in front of my apartment when a police car pulled over to the curb with its lights flashing. The officer asked me if I had some identification, so I provided him my driver's license (fortunately, I grabbed my wallet for my walk). The officer said that someone had complained that I was taking pictures of the bank. He asked me, "Were you taking pictures of the bank?" I realized there was a bank building on the corner, on the other side of the vacant field where I had been standing. I remembered one guy in a pickup truck had stopped and watched me in the drive-through after he had finished his banking business. I told the officer that I had taken the panarama, which would, of course, include at least one shot of the bank. I pointed out that I took more pictures of the Post Office than I did of the bank, but the officer said that no one had complained about my taking pictures of the Post Office.
The officer said he was just checking if I was a felon. He said that if the check came back clear, I would be free to go, because there is no law against taking photographs. He asked me if I lived around there, and I pointed to my apartment complex behind me. We stood there and waited several minutes, while the driver's in the school zone slowly drove past us.
A second police car pulled up behind the first police car, also with lights flashing. I turned to look at it. The officer next to me asked me if there were someone with me. I told him I was alone. The officer again said I would be free to go after they checked to see if I was wanted in any state. We waited...
Finally, word came back that my record was clean. The officer returned my driver's license and walked over to the second police car. I turned around and stepped into a small hole in the ground.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I can see my house from here! ;-)
As well as probable cause that you are doing drugs. :)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
So if they are listening to classical music as they drive, what are the chances it would be Camera Van Beethoven?
rolling in his grave, I'm sure
"2002-2004: I began taking cross-country trips covering hundreds of miles, in an effort to explore as much of my area (Texas) as possible. Although I have a 10 Gig MindStor, a digital camera and a miniDV video camera, I could imagine ways to turn my vehicle into a data collection vessel worthy of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Among its equipment would be the 360 degree video/still cameras on the roof, a WiFi network adapter and a file server. I might hope that I could access any of my photographs and other data from a PDA connected to my vehicle network via the WiFi connection. It would also be nice if I could simply point at something outside the vehicle while I am driving, and the cameras would automatically follow, zoom and photograph. When I return to my home, my vehicle could wirelessly connect to my home server and download all the data I had collected in my travels."
I've been waiting for a device like this
OK, someone beat me to this. Fine. That saves me a lot of work (BTW, where can I get a used one of these vans?). I have more ideas.
Just yesterday, I was taking a nap. I dreamed that I was in a small room, which had a wooden floor and white painted walls, like a nursery in a home might have. On the floor was a large decal, about a yard (meter) wide and a yard (meter) tall. It was similar to the advertisement decals that some stores put on their floors. This one was a decal of a fish in an underwater scene, like a scene from "Finding Nemo." I could see the clear plastic around the edges of the decal. There was a large rectangle in one corner of the decal. When I pressed on the rectangle, it changed to a yellow color, and the image of the fish and underwater scene changed to an image of Disney's Cinderella Palace. The graphic was crisp and the color was dense, like that of a professional printing. I only saw solid colors, not a bunch of colored spots or halftones. Pressing on the yellow rectangle changed the scene back to the original scene. My Mom walked across the floor and across the decal, which did no visible damage to the decal.
How long do you think it will be before we have the technology to make a decal like I saw in my dream?
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Well, unlike the silly superstition that photographing someone takes away their soul, the protective spirits that surround your house do have that problem. Hence, for all of our karmic safety, we must stop this diabolical plan.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
there is a website ( http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/ ), and it has a photograph of every building in paris and by clicking on the map you can see any of those buildings.... its pretty cool.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
This is not a violation of my rights. Any moron can take a picture of my building. This sure as hell isn't an "online" issue.
Is michael using timothy's account today?
But there already is a "Camera Van" with hunderds of cameras that has been touring the country taking pictures for almost a decade! This would be Harrod Blank's art car.
122 15.23' W, 37 50.97' N
You're not visiting websites, you don't go to the library. You haven't traveled outside the country, you don't travel inside the country. You don't belong to any politically active groups, you have never donated to a candidate. You don't talk to weird people. You are not a potential threat. All you do is watch television. And you just aren't living.
I wear my FAA yellow flag as a mark of pride.
But on a more serious note, how is having 300 million suspects better than having none?
The ______ Agenda
I'm surprised that noone has, apparently, mentioned the Aspen project, done in the mid 70s by the MIT Architecture Machine Lab group, the precursor to the Media Lab.
The Aspen project photographed the entire city of Aspen, taking a picture every 10 (?) feet on every street, looking left and right, forward and back, during each of 4 seasons, and making most turns. The images were put on a videodisk (12-inch, analog, precursor to DVDs), and software was written which, in conjunction with special video switching hardware and 2 copies of the disk spinning, made it possible to "drive" throughout the city. Aspen was chosen for this project because it's nice and rectilinear, and the size they wanted. The skiing and good food were irrelevant, I'm sure.
Some of the buildings (e.g., city hall) in addition had slide shows of the interior, so you could virtually "enter" the building; in one case there was even a video interview (with the mayor, or some such).
The system ultimately died when the special hardware was destroyed because the owners were sick and tired of demoing it. There's a paper somewhere describing all this. It's not as well known as it deserves to be.
Identification for the fire truck: "The house the smoke is coming from"
Here: http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/x/home_paris.htm Quite handy.
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.
Hmm. In Managua they don't have street names. Instead the adressess are relative well-known land mark, such as "From where the store 'La Vicky' used to be, one block towards the lake, 25 meters towards the sunrise" and that's not just directions you give the cabbie. It is official enough that it is what is used in phone directories, what fill out in government forms etc.
It seems like something like this is an ideal candidate for a volunteer-based effort. Volunteers could try to catalog as many addresses as they could, and upload them to a server. This would be somewhat like a similar effort to take photographs of as many gps-marked areas of the world as possible (can't recall the name off-hand).
Only problem might be that people often get quite testy when they see you photographing their property...
Link it to map quest. Driving directions could be visual.
Ah, so now even female drivers can find their way around a strange city! ;)
(ducks)
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If you want to build your "dream cave" you'll need to do it with your own money, and good luck selling it, potential buyers will have a hard time getting a loan to build it.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
In fact, the basis of law in not equality (as people like myself posit it should be), but in fact the basis of law is priviledge. And if you look at the roots of the word, privi-ledge, you get private-law. That is to say, those laws which are to be enforced must always be enforced unequally. If every law were enforced on every person, then we would find ourselves caught in the "That which is not prohibited is mandated, that which is not mandated is prohibited" situation (which presumably precludes either free-choice or free-dom).
So it's legal, yeah, as long as you're not in the wrong place at the wrong time, or have long hair, or holding a placard, or have the "wrong" skin color, or just plain weird out the cops.
Is it legal? Yeah, totally legal. Just don't get caught.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
The French already have that for large cities.
Here an example with Paris. CLick on the map to get a photo
From the article:
If it gets funding, it plans to photograph the 25 largest cities in the country over the next five years using more than a dozen vans.
-CowboyNick
Actually, I was taking a picture of the Baha'i Temple in Wilmette once, at night (they light it up very nicely, beautiful building) and had building security come out to ask what I was doing. Explained, showed him my camera, he said "That's cool. If I give you my email address, will you send me copies?"
Best treatment I've had from a security guard, ever.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Hey smartass, try this on for size: "The house with the elderly woman who pushed her medi-alert pendant is..."
The elderly population has exploded- our fire/police departments spend more time running around answering medical calls like that than anything else...especially out in the countryside.
Please help metamoderate.
BTW, I though that for medical emergencies there are other people than fire/police. What about paramedics, those people with yellow (at least here, or white) vans loaded with various medical equipment? Firefighters are usually better equipped for accessing inaccessible places and extinguishing fires.