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Riding Shotgun With the Google Street View Beetle
longacre writes "Popular Mechanics takes a ride in an Immersive Media VW Beetle, one of the six cars that drives around America shooting images for Google Maps Street View. Mounted on the roof is the $45,000 Dodeca 2360 video camera, whose 11 lenses record a 360 degree field of view at 30 frames per second, sucking up as many as 200 miles of city scenes per day. The setup takes up the whole back seat and part of the front passenger seat, and is all controlled with an off-the-shelf Logitech game controller. Includes a cool interactive raw video of a drive through Manhattan."
What in the wide world of sports are you talking about? Did you know that the Constitution protects the right for anybody to record anything that happens in public?
Crank up the halon system, this ought to be good.
Eh, it's actually pretty good... check out the flash file that that viewer is displaying: http://demos.immersivemedia.com/fvdemo_1/data/CylindricalFlashPlayerDemoSite/PopularMechanicsNYCDriveAlong/video.flv Open that without their custom flash player and you get 1024x512 video... And I'd imagine they're recording higher than that. Also, check out some of the actual shots in google: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=32.734512,-117.159705&spn=0.024981,0.05373&z=15&om=1&layer=c&cbll=32.72197,-117.161636&cbp=2,356.38393784103107,,1,-18.177554028083662&title=Google Maps&source=k Pan around that one and double click to zoom in on the license plates of the cars on the street. You can zoom in VERY far.. and read them.
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