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Google Street View Backpack Now Available To Volunteers
It's not just for obscure Japanese islands anymore: reader NobleSavage writes with news that "If you're a tourism board, non-profit, university, research organization or other third party who can gain access and help collect imagery of hard to reach places, you can apply to borrow the Trekker and help map the world." You can also help map the world (albeit without the very neat Trekker backpack cam) without an application process via OpenStreetMap. But if you had access to a panoramic camera like this, what places or spaces would you want to capture? I hope there will be street view imagery of Petra, but I don't see any yet.
I want to see Chernobyl please.
hemi
travel with a companion/bodyguard if you're gonna map a ghetto
A place I went, a "lost city" in the Sahara
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I want to see the Pitcairn Islands. It's notorious hard to get to, and it ensures that the sun never sets on the British empire.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Now.. how long until we see some places where you simply look behind the guy and see some armed grunts pointing their guns at the guy wearing the cam?
I just saw the Google van going down my private road this morning at least a half mile beyond a big sign that says PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING. This county allows for people to meet trespassers with deadly force. I hope that point that out to anyone using Trekker.
Jan Mayen would be fun to explore in Google Maps.
The Trekker is operated by an Android device and consists of 15 lenses angled in a different direction so the images can be stitched together into 360-degree panoramic views.
That's quite neat, but if you want something simpler, wouldn't it be possible to use a single, vertically oriented digital camera with a hyperboloid mirror in front of it, and process the stuff in a computer? The optical system would be axially symmetrical, so the angle in the picture would correspond to the azimuth, and the distance from the center would be a useful function of the elevation (I believe that with the hyperboloid, it should be linear.) You wouldn't get any sort of insanely high resolution in the azimuth but it should still be usable (and much more lightweight, simpler and cheaper).
Ezekiel 23:20
Waw en-Namus, south-western Libya
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
A little something right here at home, I would love to take this thing hiking through the trails of the Olympic National Forest. Or really, any of the awesome mountains in the Washington area, like Mt Rainier!
So essentially Google want people to give some of their time for free in addition of taking ownership of the work they'd be doing?
I doubt volunteers want to give the IP of their work to Google so that they can monetize it.
I want one for Scuba.
Mapping airports could have some benefits. Some of them are a real maze
One question: how much are they going to pay me?
That thing looks like it's at least 20 kilo's, not a very comfortable hike I imagine. Cool that you can but I would imagine it needs a little bit of slimming down before you can conveniently take it with you.
Hook some flood lights up to that sucker and take it caving.
I started using Map Maker when it was released here in the UK a couple of months ago. I stopped when I questioned why I was giving my time, knowledge and expertise to a private company for free.
from http://www.elemental.org/~daleg/gargoyle/
"
What is the Gargoyle?
The Gargoyle wearable computer is a project I am undertaking to study and
improve apon current technologies and adapt them for use in a wearable computer
application and a environment of every-day, practicle use. I am naming the
prototype I am building "Gargoyle". This name comes from Neil Stephenson's
popular cyberpunk novel "Snow Crash". In this a book, a Gargoyle refers to
a person who wears a wearable computer of sorts, and is constantly collecting
information or intel about his/her surroundings, and is near-constantly
jacked into the Metaverse (a futuristic MUSH-like version of the Internet).
"
It's good to see the link to OpenStreetMap. It's not very good where I live, so I'm actually contributing instead of just bitching about it on /.
(Yeah, just this once)
Now that Waze has been absorbed by the Gorg, I'd love to see a Kickstarter for a no-brainier device and app (android & iOS please) to enable both navigation, OSM updates, (but make it easy, please), and the social features that Waze got pretty well right.
C'mon somebody, I'll put a 1000 bucks down for the first two devices...for 500 each you could throw in a decent camera and some memory for Streetview-like
I'm sure you could get people like Samsung to contribute to the costs for the servers...imagine, genuinely free maps and Streetview
How about sending along a couple of backpacks (and monetary donations) with vetted charitable aid groups (Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, etc)?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Sibley Volcanic Preserve in Oakland, CA on the Hayward fault.
Fault moved half-a-mile in the last 9.5 billion years, giving Round Top Volcano a tail.
North of the Caldecott Tunnel in Tilden Park is the Nimitz Trail (paved) along the ridgeline from Berkeley to Richmond (exits at Clark Rd in El Sobrante & Hillcrest Rd in Richmond), part of the Bay Area Ridge Trail.
Turn one way and see he Golden Gate & Richmond Bridges, the other overlooks San Pablo Reservoir and the earthen San Pablo Dam.
The trail along the valley floor is spectacular as well. McBryde Ave. to Alvarado Park in Richmond becomes the trail through Wildcat Canyon before Tilden in Berkeley.
Wear this so we can see where you go. What, you have concerns for your privacy?
and let people vote with their wallets, where to send guys. Area 51, Mount Everest, neighbours backyard where screams are heard, etc.
El Capitan and other big walls are amazing places, and are only seen in first person perspective by very few.
Howdy - have you seen Vespucchi (Android), Go Map!! (iOS), or keypad mapper (android)?
If so, what would you like best added to any of them? Also, feel like donating to a couple of elance projects to create patches?
And you'd infringe a variety of patents on just such cameras. Patents held by aggressively litigating firms who want to sell into markets like real-estate marketing, etc.
What an awesome tool to spy building interiors, somewhere that Google cameras can't drive into yet.
Imagine how helpful this could be for the NSA!
Can I at least add Google to my resume?!
Being Google.... I would have expected them to have included this in Google Glass: GPS and always-on panoramic camera, and have it enabled by default, to upload street view imagery from every user everywhere....
You do it because you want something to show up in street view. That's why. Completely selfish. Want people to look at your island resort? I tried to check out the place we were staying. They won on the dickheadedness of whomever answered the phone at the other, cheaper place. However, if it had been on street view, it wouldn't have been a contest.
I think more people have gone to the moon that this place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heard_Island_and_McDonald_Islands
Plus there are more restrictions going here than to the moom
http://www.heardisland.aq/protection-and-management/management-plan/summary-of-measures
...what places or spaces would you want to capture?"
The offices of the NSA! :-)
(*waves to NSA threat detection algorithm*)
So Was anyone else annoyed at the guy's use of "So" to start almost everything that he said?
So why would a person in a presentation position speak so poorly?
So I would imagine that public speaking classes are in order.
So I hope to see a better interview.
So this is very annoying.
One place I'd really like to document is the suicide forest in Japan. I remember seeing the documentary about it and was fascinated with the place. It is kinda freaky when I think about trekking there; as soon as the sun starts sinking, I'm getting the hell out of there.
I'd actually be chuffed to digitise hiking trails. There are many beautiful trails in the area where I live. I know them well and digitising them would give me a new kind od purpose. And yes, I'd need the exercise.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Especially the board walk. Not because it is hard to get to but because people should see it.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The National Park Service and other cave owners should "borrow" these to map out caves Like Wind and Jewel Caves which have hundreds of miles of caverns generally inaccessible to the public. Even if they don't photograph the narrowest passages they could at least provide images of large portions that no one but dedicated cavers will ever see.
Funny how quickly the public mood can change. A month ago people would call you a terrorist for photographing and mapping semipublic spaces, today they call you an NSA agent.
Thanks; I'll take a look!
A friend involved with the project pointed out that this is more complicated than it sounds, and I'm sure he's right, but it would be fun one day to be able to take a photo, tag it with coordinates, and at least have it stuffed in an online pigeonhole for later linking to a spot on OSM-based maps. Click on a map, have it show the nearest-tagged photo ... in some places, the nearest tagged photo might be many miles away, making it a sort of challenge to split the gap by taking another photo between the distant points.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Nice piece: http://readwrite.com/2013/06/28/heres-a-heavy-dose-of-reality-for-new-mobile-payments-startup-clinkle#awesm=~oateTFWjlSMDCs