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Google Street View Backpack Now Available To Volunteers

Posted by timothy on from the salt-mines-of-poland dept.

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.

9 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Uhmm.. Chernobyl? by Hemi+Rodner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I want to see Chernobyl please.

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    hemi
    1. Re:Uhmm.. Chernobyl? by kthreadd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's actually not that bad as long as you stay out of the reactor. They didn't actually cease operation on the power plant until the year 2000.

  2. Chinguetti by vikingpower · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. Pitcairn Islands by dwheeler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    - David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
  4. What a coincidence... by t4ng* · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:What a coincidence... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You guys must have been sleeping through the "stand your ground" laws that NRA and gun manufacturing lobbyists have been getting passed in many states.

      Pretty much every state listed here that has "No" in the "Duty to retreat" column allows you to use deadly force against a trespasser that is on your property but still outside your home.

      Before you reply that your life has to be in danger, just remember that dead-men-tell-no-tales. If someone is driving a vehicle on your property, that vehicle could be a deadly weapon against you. In a rural area, where there are rarely any witnesses around, all someone would have to do in states with no duty to retreat is go stand in front of the vehicle and shoot the driver, then tell the police you told them to leave and they tried to run you down. In the absence of any other evidence or witnesses against your story, the police would most likely accept it, especially if the dead person is not a local in your area. It's the wild, wild west in some areas and that's just the way the NRA and gun manufactures wants it to be. City folk ought to take those "No Trespassing" signs out in the country side more seriously.

  5. Simple panoramic camera? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  6. The unseen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hook some flood lights up to that sucker and take it caving.

  7. Or... by proverbialcow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How about sending along a couple of backpacks (and monetary donations) with vetted charitable aid groups (Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, etc)?

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    The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion