Google Treks

http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetview/treks/

by ricg • 13 years ago

345 106 13 years ago

Breefield• 13 years ago

I have heard Google plans to do street-view of Burning Man, but it has never appeared. Perhaps this will be the venue if/when it finally does.

pierlux• 13 years ago

They would have to blur far more than faces. Just sayin'.

retr0h• 13 years ago

shirt-cockers ftw!

steve19• 13 years ago

Probably not going to happen. The organizers require (or used to require) a percentage of all revenue made from professionally taken photos [0]

[0] http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/burningman.html

voltagex_• 13 years ago

That's crap.

Edit: damn, we need more people like jwz.

benatkin2• 13 years ago

Google can't wait to usher in a future where people stay in their rooms and eat Soylent while being entertained and exercised by their VR-enabled computers.

jac_no_k• 13 years ago

Partly a reality for cyclists.

http://www.tacx.com/en/products/trainers/i-genius-multiplaye...

http://www.cycleops.com/en/products/software/virtual-trainin...

http://www.minoura.jp/english/trainer-e/option-e/cogmon-e.ht...

Cycling on indoor trainers is boring without some sort of incentive.

FPSDavid• 13 years ago

iGenius + computer-controlled fan + Oculus Rift = give me NOW!

corysama• 13 years ago

You laugh. My first thought was how to get this mashed up with https://github.com/benvanik/vr.js

estel• 13 years ago

There's already Streetview: http://oculusstreetview.eu.pn/?lat=25.196966&lng=55.27379900...

Eliezer• 13 years ago

Yeah, I hate to be a Luddite but... this is just wrong, wrong, wrong. And I speak as someone who looks forward to Soylent.

afhof• 13 years ago

Arguably these are great advertisements for the places they represent. If you were choosing between places to travel to, I think this would be helpful.

enneff4• 13 years ago

That's pretty short-sighted.

Imagine if we had these kind of views of, say, the streets of London in 1900? This is worth doing for history's sake alone.

coldtea7• 13 years ago

Imagine if we had these kind of views of, say, the streets of London in 1900? This is worth doing for history's sake alone.

For one, yeah, "what if" we had these kind of views for the streets of London in 1900? I doubt many would care, same as not many care for 1900 music, 1900 books, 1900 photographs and such. Some scholars maybe.

Second, what the parent said goes beyond that. Essentially he says, the people of 2200 could have the streets of 2100 fully 3D imaged, but empty of life, with people of 2100 mostly staying at home and merely doing VR walks.

Now this might sound far-fetched and implausible, but not much more than telling 1900 people that in 100 years there would be cities were people rarely walk in public to go about their business but mostly go around with their cars.

s_kilk• 13 years ago

You should check out a book called The Light Of Other Days, in which remote-viewing wormhole-cameras are invented and a situation similar to what you are describing plays out.

benatkin2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation! I've not read that one yet, bit it sounds intriguing.

nazgulnarsil• 13 years ago

Check your bipedal privilege cis scum. No but seriously, every time you feel the urge to make a luddite point remember that there are disabled people who are getting a whole new lease on life via enabling technologies.

lclarkmichalek• 13 years ago

Or, you know, poor people. There is a very large cross section between people who have access to computers and people who do not have the means to be able to visit the places that Google has documented here.

hvs2• 13 years ago

"Scum"? Trying to raise the level of discourse are we?

mtgx• 13 years ago

I'm trying to decide whether you're making a positive point or a negative one.

jpswade• 13 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY5It0jnD6M

VLM3• 13 years ago

I use goog maps to plan hikes, to answer questions like "is this section of the trail kid / cub scout compatible"? Some trail sections are not. I can do a halfway good job with the satellite images and some topo knowledge but this new GOOG "streetview" trail UI is so close, yet so far from what I need.

What I need is something like a youtube of a high speed (maybe 30 mph equiv?) run down the trail.

I'm looking for stuff like hazards and issues. Like, oh, look, a swamp, either bug spray or forget it. Oh, look, a cliff, well thats very scenic but I'm not taking the kids there. Oh look, a whole field of poison ivy, best remember to corral the kids around there. Oh look, a blind corner and adjacent highway crossing, need to keep the kids under somewhat tighter control in that area. Oh look, picnic tables, guess where the kids are stopping to eat lunch?

Another obvious problem is the county I live in has at least 100 miles of trails either cross country or in parks, and the Mighty GOOG has ... the grand canyon. Well thats nice but I'm hiking a short segment of the ice age trail this saturday, not the grand canyon. Someday the streetview-like trail tech will be useful to me, but for years I suspect it'll be merely aspirational. It would be like having streetview for streets... but only in Mountain View.

eigenvector• 13 years ago

Not to be snarky or anything, but have you tried calling the park office? US national park rangers, particularly in the parks with large backcountry area, are both very knowledgeable and very helpful.

bytesmith2• 13 years ago

I hope they render some of these for the Oculus. Making View, a Norwegian company with similar 360 degree camera technology has released a few Oculus demo clips of people doing amazing things with their cameras. http://makingview.no/makingview.com/?page_id=1691

jwheeler79• 13 years ago

Did anyone else see the similarity between the examples and New York Times Snowfall?

dmazin• 13 years ago

Here's what the non-car-mounted camera machines look like, if anyone's wondering:

http://i.imgur.com/BjHLoPh.jpg

v33ra• 13 years ago

The camera machine can be seen very clearly in this video: http://youtu.be/cn7AFhVEI5o?t=43s

proex• 13 years ago

For the times you want to go outside while sitting on your chair in front of your computer ?

wooster• 13 years ago

For anyone else confused, as I was, by the Everest trek photos: these were taken with tripods and not with the new Trekker gear.

ohwp2• 13 years ago

This is a little unrelated but I notice that all Google services are getting very slow. They eat up CPU and memory like it's nothing.

It's nice what can be done with Internet these days but I prefer the old quick Google with almost the same features but less shine.

jeffjose• 13 years ago

Yup. This surely is unrelated.

ohwp2• 13 years ago

Well in fact it wasn't that unrelated. I can barely watch the special Google maps sites like this one: http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetvie...

defap• 13 years ago

I have to agree, at least in terms of these Trek sites. The latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome constantly use 50%+ of my CPU to render these pages, without me having to scroll or interact at all. For a site that doesn't use any plug-ins, it sure heats up my laptop like a plug-in would.

* Edit: I only meant to agree that these specific Trek sites feel very slow, not "all Google services."

INSURGENCYmusic2• 13 years ago

I'm going to do one on Compton, CA.

VLM3• 13 years ago

I see you got downvoted, but ruins of all kinds have always been popular, and a classic recent linkbait has been "pictures of the ruins of abandoned Detroit", seems like every popular magazine / website has tried that one as linkbait.

It seems both inevitable, interesting, and on topic.

Using census records I found the house some of my ancestors lived in about a century ago. The neighborhood has gone, uh, dramatically downhill since then, I wouldn't go there today without kevlar and a rifle, but it was interesting to view the original mostly unmodified house on streetview.

There is also a whole "urban explorer" subculture out there and legally obtained pix of ruins would be interesting.

INSURGENCYmusic2• 13 years ago

I actually wasn't even joking. I install a shit load of alarm systems down there. Around 10 a month, in abandoned properties. Thought it would be an interesting take on Trek.

apunic• 13 years ago

Just because it's from Google it must be special?

Don't want to sound too negative but wondering if Trek would get any attention if done by some startup.

swamp40• 13 years ago

If some startup comes along and provides stunning zoom-able StreetView pictures of some no-name street in Tel-Aviv and two clicks later it can show you the red light district in Bangkok, all for free and all taken in 2013, I think a lot of people would give that startup its due.

dylangs10303• 13 years ago

I'm not sure you appreciate the engineering infrastructure at work here. This isn't special because Google is doing it, it's special because it's really hard to do. How would you go about attempting this project as effectively as Google with the resources of a typical startup company?

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

Crawl the web for images, use the GPS EXIF data to find clusters, and use image processing to stitch together 3D environments from the photos.

It would not be as good as streetview though.

toyg• 13 years ago

Current top comment in this thread is exactly about a company doing it since 2004 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6210281 ). I'd never heard of them before; if anything, this is free publicity for them. Tide raising all boats etc etc.

mynegation• 13 years ago

Where do I apply and what is the hourly rate? I assume all travel expenses are also paid.

On a serious note, in the footsteps of OpenStreetMap that could be a great next community project: write the software for the infrastructure and the camera gear, open the designs of data collecting hardware (for the 3D printers) and let people upload their treks.

aray• 13 years ago

Elphel has been working on open source (hardware, software, board designs, etc) photogrammetric cameras for a while:

http://www3.elphel.com/eyesis-4pi

bibinou2• 13 years ago

  > Where do I apply

http://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/streetview/trekker...

Thlom• 13 years ago

One of the richest companies in the world are asking the public to help them for free?

alohahacker• 13 years ago

They should hook up with a buddy of mine eric! He's currently going to all 194 countries and having some amazing experiences. Seems like the perfect partnership!

http://gowitheric.com/

dylangs10303• 13 years ago

I would do this in a heartbeat, even for a substantially reduced salary. Assuming travel expenses and meals/shelter are paid for (within reason) I'd travel all over the world for an opportunity like this. Awesome. Google's been coming under a lot of fire lately but between this and Google Loon[1] I think Google's cooking up some really innovative, practically useful and genuinely creative toys for the world to play with.

[1] http://www.google.com/loon/#utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc...

leviathan• 13 years ago

It's mind boggling how bad the arabic translation is at: http://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetvie...

It's like they ran the text in google translate and never bothered to check the results.

ixacto• 13 years ago

Never mind the actual window-washers and builders who made these buildings are de-facto slaves to the Monarch of Dubai Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Then in the next demo over they try to get all multicultural with the first nations language "ᓱᑯᑦᑎᐊᓃᒃᑲᓗᐊᕐᖓᑦ ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ? "

http://www.vice.com/vice-news/the-slaves-of-dubai

kamaal2• 13 years ago

Arabic is a bit like English. Just like how England is not the country with majority of English speakers, In the same way 'Arabs' don't make up all the Arabic speakers.

Arabic speakers exists in nearly every country where there are Muslims. Which is what nearly 30% of the world population?

infinitone• 13 years ago

The same is said for practically every civilization ever.

nakedrobot22• 13 years ago

There are some great images here. I like how Google has been striving to document more beautiful places. The sheer amount of brainpower and processing that Google is putting into Streetview is truly staggering and unprecedented. Nobody else out there is doing it in this way.

On a more hand-made note, my company, http://360cities.net, has been publishing user-generated 360º imagery since 2006. I have built a tour of my own city, Prague, starting in 2004, which was before Google Maps or Streetview. We now have hundreds of thousands of images, (all high-resolution, completely spherical 360º photos) from every country of the world, including some very remarkable places in Antarctica, skydiving from an airplane, underwater, "remote" places such as Havana, Iran, Tibet, Burma, Easter Island, and so on.

Our "editors' picks" are something I'm really proud of. https://www.360cities.net/search/@tags-editorspicks

here is our world map. zoomed out, you should see only "great" stuff: http://www.360cities.net/map

Other services that are similar to 360cities include http://viewat.org, http://roundus.com, http://arounder.com, http://photosynth.net.

Then there are the services for iphone/android 360º app, but these images are far lower in quality overall: http://occipital.com/360/verse and http://dermandar.com/worldmap

edit: made all links clickable

monsterix• 13 years ago

Upvoted, bookmarked and thanks! Always in the look for alternatives to Google.

rattray• 13 years ago

Why was this downvoted?

calbear81• 13 years ago

Awesome! What do you think of combining 360º imagery with something like Oculus Rift to enable immersive travel experiences?

davidw• 13 years ago

Great, now when the f* am I going to get terrain back on Maps for Android?! Last summer, my phone provided some information about terrain difficulty for light hikes (serious ones should involve a paper map so that you're not screwed if you lose battery/signal/whatever), bike rides and whatnot. This summer, with a newer, fancier, Nexus 4, that information is gone. The world is flat, indeed.

infinite_snoop• 13 years ago

I've noticed two features silently vanishing from my galaxy s2. Installed apps no longer appear in the search results from the Google Now widget and I no longer have the option to download a complete email in th ebuilt in email client.

Have these been removed due to patents?

nakedrobot22• 13 years ago

If you use the distance measurement button, it tells you the elevation of the segment you are measuring, I believe. I know this is not the same thing, but maybe it's helpful.

phireal• 13 years ago

The distance measurement tool has been removed from more recent versions of Maps. It's why I haven't upgraded to the latest version, as the elevation profiles from the distance tool are really handy.

katmasteron• 13 years ago

It would be nice to try something like this with Oculus Rift and video. Would probably be a cool experience to view the trip down the Amazon Basin in a video and thanks to 360 degree camera / video capture, one would be able to move the head around and get an interactive experience out of it.

I would like to try something like this just to test what kind of "being there" feeling would be achievable with the current tech.

bytesmith2• 13 years ago

See my link below for an Oculus demo using 360 degree cameras. It's doesn't feel nearly as fluid or 3D as the other Oculus demos, but it's promising nonetheless.

Stupendous• 13 years ago

Stuff like this makes it really hard to stay angry at Google.. just beautiful.

pistoriusp• 13 years ago

It's a shame that the page performs so `jaggy` on my computer.

runn1ng2• 13 years ago

One less reason to go outside my basement, great!

lenage• 13 years ago

Great images here and thanks google did this for the world

jkl32• 13 years ago

What a blatant PR attempt to put lipstick on a pig.

Do not forget who we're dealing with, Google gave the NSA unrestricted access to every system without any legal challenge. No amount of pretty photos will make up for that.

mason2403• 13 years ago

Google didn't "give" the NSA anything. The NSA forced their way in.

wtvanhest3• 13 years ago

I can't believe I'm typing this, but after the new Google map changes, it runs so slow on my home and office computer that I was forced to switch to bing. It still works on my mobile, but its just unbearable on the other systems.

I hope they create a more streamlined version soon.

marcioaguiar• 13 years ago

Definetly slower. Also, there's some features I miss from the old maps, like navigation on the map while on StreetView and the measurement ruler (from labs). But you don't need to switch to Bing as you can still change to the classic google maps.

wtvanhest3• 13 years ago

I'm glad to hear I am not the only one with performance issues. That is a lot more upvotes than I expected, especially considering how google heavy the user base is here.

I love google's products and the fact that they all work together but everything seems to be running slower than it ever has before.

Looking at the comments below, it is pretty clear that other people are also having this issue.

It takes a lot for me to stop what I am doing, and move over to Bing so if I am doing it, other people are doing it as well.

They should put making all of their applications less CPU intensive at the top of their list, right away.

===Also, while I am complaining about Google products, the google news doesn't let me easily search by time anymore which has also forced me over to bing. Articles from 30 days ago are rarely useful.

runn1ng2• 13 years ago

I can't upvote you enough.

graeme• 13 years ago

I have the same issue. I have a fully upgraded 2011 Macbook air, and a very fast internet connection.

New maps are completely unusable. It's shocking. My computer is faster than most computers. Maps shouldn't fail on it.

I switched back to classic maps. The option is on the right hand side. You may have to clear your cache to make it permanent.

typon• 13 years ago

Yep, finally switched to Bing, although I was supposed to be using it even before, and it's soo much faster than the new Google maps.

cloudwalking• 13 years ago

Why don't you just opt-out of the new Maps beta?

wtvanhest3• 13 years ago

Its easier to just go to bing then to figure out and remember how to opt out every time. I'm still shocked they released such bad software.

math0ne• 13 years ago

Yeah, seems crazy to me they are releasing it when it's so slow. Unusably slow in a very modern computer.

tocomment• 13 years ago

It would be amazing if we could put these in the Oculus rift someday. Are there any plans for that?

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