Ragsdale hooked his camera up to a jeep and drove around West Point at up to 100 kilometers per hour capturing images. He programmed his rig to take one set of images every 20 seconds, and in an hour had 300MB of data.
(Credit: IEEE Spectrum)Google Wave is getting all the Googley press this week, but let us not forget one of The Goog's other impressive creations: Street View in Google Maps.
As part of a "disruptive technologies" course at West Point, Roy Ragsdale put together his very own Street View camera vehicle, and in an IEEE Spectrum article, he offers a fairly straightforward and cool how-to on doing the same. Why you'd want to is beyond me. Sure, it's cool, but I like to spend my spare time talking to girls.
Street View, of course, affords panoramic views of places on Google Maps so you can get a street-level view of the place you're looking at.
Ragsdale's rig uses a handful of Microsoft NX-6000 LifeCams that he picked up for $25 a pop, and a GlobalSat BU-353 GPS receiver he got for $37, all of which he plugs into a standard Ubuntu-powered laptop to map where he's been. The setup uses open-source software like luvcview from Logitech, so anyone could probably make this happen with a little tweaking. On top of that, all the parts are off-the-shelf. That sounds like it could be simple enough for a great weekend project.
What you do with the images is up to you, though. Google currently isn't accepting home-brewed Street View pictures, though it would be cool if it did. It would allow smaller towns that Google hasn't yet seen fit to Street Viewify to get on the map, as it were. But we're not holding our breath on that.
For reasons of privacy, we have blurred the faces and license plates in this photo. Google will be doing the same.
(Credit: Crave Asia)Take note, you heard it first from CNET Asia--Google's Street View is coming to Singapore. An eagle-eyed CNET Asia reader named Andrew sent us a picture of this silver Opel Astra complete with cameras doubling its height and the Google logo pasted on the side door. This was spotted at the junction between Dorset Road and Kampong Java Road.
We contacted Google, and the search giant confirmed that the service will be coming to Google Maps Singapore in the coming months. Street View launched in Japan earlier this year.
For those unfamiliar with Street View, this feature of Google Maps gives the user a photographic view of the location being searched. It has attracted controversy, with some residents of Street View-enabled cities complaining of loss of privacy. In some cases, men have been caught entering places like adult book stores, while others have been captured while inside their own private property. To address these concerns, Google will be blurring faces and license plate numbers before uploading the images.
Tools for users and authorities to report on images they are uncomfortable about will also be put in place, similar to what the company has done in the U.S., Australia, Japan, and France.
In any case, watch what you do or where you go, Singapore--Google is watching.
(Via Crave Asia)
So, to further demonstrate that the world cannot get enough of Google's Street View feature--or at least to demonstrate that I can't move on--I'd like to invite our readers to participate one more time in a gallery, this time by sending in any Street View images that can demonstrate, without question, when the image was taken.
Last week, I asked for your favorite Street View images, and dozens of you responded.
Google's Street View feature lets people see street-level images from several U.S. cities
(Credit: Google)So, while there could be many ways to prove when an image was taken, some might be a newspaper front page that's visible, or an event that can clearly be dated.
If you can find it, there's a good chance I'll run it in the gallery.
Perhaps I'm the only one who cares about this particular element of this phenomenon, but I hope not.
Please send any submissions to me at daniel.terdiman@cnet.com and put "Street View Date" in the subject line. And please explain your rationale for saying what date the photograph was taken was.
Thank you, world. If there are any good submissions, I'll post a gallery within a day or so.
What do you get when you mash up the latest, greatest Google feature with an unconference full of hackers?
I'm tempted to say pure magic, but instead I'll say you get Hacking Google Street View, the report from WhereCamp that I found on my favorite blog, Waxy.org, Monday.
Google's Street View feature lets people see street-level images from several U.S. cities
(Credit: Google)So what is it? It's hackers playing with the Street View APIs, figuring out ways to do things like mash up Grand Theft Auto with the hot new mapping phenomenon.
"Greg Sadetsky cracked Street View a couple hours after the announcement at Where 2.0," the Brain Off post reported. "It was pretty easy and comprehensible...almost as if the Google engineers wanted it hacked. I'm sure they did."
Nothing specific came out of the late-night geekery, but knowing what people with good ideas can come up with, especially when enabled as they usually are when it comes to Google Maps projects, I'm sure that within days, we'll be seeing some very cool things spreading across the Intertubes.
If you've been playing with Google's new Street View feature--that $25 billion time suck--you may well have wondered how the heck they took those 360-degree images while driving down the street.
The camera used by Immersive Media for Google's Street View images.
(Credit: Immersive Media)Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know that many of the images, at least those shot outside the San Francisco Bay Area--were shot using this fairly disco-ball-esque device by the outside contractor, Immersive Media.
What's not clear just yet is if Google used the same kind of camera in the Bay Area, where the company shot its own, higher-resolution images. But it must have been something similar, though we know from this image that Google used a van, while Immersive Media seems to have used a Volkswagen New Beetle.
Enjoy. Oh, and did I say $25 billion time suck? By now, it's up to $26 billion. And counting.
When I heard about the new Street View feature Google Maps unveiled Tuesday, the first thing I thought--after I discovered that anyone in the world could see my car parked in my driveway--was that the next great craze would be people posting images from the service showing personal details from their own homes, jobs or what have you.
CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman's car as seen in his driveway using the Google Maps Street View feature
(Credit: Google)Sure enough, I pop over to Boing Boing today and lo and behold, there's a posting about someone whose cat is visible through the window in such detail that you can even see that it's a tabby.
And I thought, I want to do a story, or at least a photo gallery, illustrating some of the more interesting examples of this thing that some might call spying.
So, if you have found a particularly interesting image using Street View that helps make this point, please send me the link and a brief description. You can send it to daniel.terdiman@cnet.com. Please put "Street View" in the subject line.
And within a couple days, I'll post something with the best submissions.
Thanks, and happy hunting.
- prev
- 1
- next
