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Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
- mtmail 8y agoIf you want to repeat that in your neighboorhood in a smaller scale, there's https://www.openstreetcam.org/ https://www.openstreetcam.org/ (software open source, content CC-BY-SA) and https://www.mapillary.com/ https://www.mapillary.com/ (propietary afaik, content CC-BY-SA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services
- monksy 8y agoOpen street cam looks pretty cool. I wonder how they're combining all of those images. Just looked it at, they're just a sequence of images of a drive. Don't expect a google street view like experience.
- andrewharvey 8y agoIt's completely depended on what people contribute, if you collect 360 images with a 360 camera then you can get the google street view like experience. The community contributors to Mapillary have done a lot of 360 imagery.
- win2020 8y agoDo they have a guide on how to setup your rig to get best results possible?
- andrewharvey 8y agoThere's a forum where the community talks about capture setup https://forum.mapillary.com/c/contributing-and-equipment https://forum.mapillary.com/c/contributing-and-equipment It's varies a bit depending if you're capturing via car, bicycle, foot or any other mode of transport, then again based on your budget and how much effort you want to put into your setup.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> I wonder how they're combining all of those images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_from_motion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_from_motion Mapillary's open contribution (Structure from Motion pipeline): https://github.com/mapillary/OpenSfM https://github.com/mapillary/OpenSfM
- jakecopp 8y agoThe best thing in my view about contributing to these services is that volunteers can use that imagery to improve www.openstreetmap.org In my experience street level imagery is extremely helpful to add business names and other points of interest!
- grecy 8y agoI wonder how they got gas or diesel... there is essentially none in Zimbabwe right now. Even cooking oil is getting hard to come by as everyone is running it as diesel in older mechanical engines (which burn it fine)
- chirau 8y agoAs Robert Mugabe would say, "If you think there is no fuel in Zimbabwe, just sit in the middle of the road." Lol. That guy was something else.
- kilroy123 8y agoForgive me, I'm not up to date on Zimbabwe news. Why can't you get gas and cooking oil?
- mav3rick 8y agoEconomy is in tatters. The Zimbabwean dollar is worth less right now.
- MadTitan 8y agoNo Zim dollar, Zimbabwe uses the bond note which is officially pegged at 1:1 with the dollar. In reality it is going at 1:3.5 at current black market rates (which is the only place you can actually change your currency).
- chadAnon69 8y agoa picture is worth a thousand words https://imgur.com/a/Z8IuSfW https://imgur.com/a/Z8IuSfW https://imgur.com/gallery/78rUWtU https://imgur.com/gallery/78rUWtU Based on the land grab laws South Africa has passed and their current water shortages I imagine we'll be seeing something similar there as well
- oh_sigh 8y agoThere is gas and diesel - it is just expensive for everyday folk relative to how much money they can realistically make. If you work in SF and spend $5000 on a passion project flying to Zimbabwe, you will have no problem affording gas.
- j2bax 8y agoI’d love to see the vast trail systems of the US get the street view treatment.
- ehnto 8y agoI am just impressed they are mapped at all. Not entirely reliable as trails get changed over seasons and for maintenance and so on, but it is still impressive to be able to get an overview of a trail system.
- code_duck 8y agoI’m amazed that they went into my gym.
- propogandist 8y agoThe business owner can hire authorized streetview photographers to upload images to Google Maps' native street view experience. It exists to strengthen Google's moat and incentivize SMBs to spend more $ with Google.
- floatingatoll 8y agoWhile I’m glad someone found a way to turn money into happiness, this feels like the Black Mirror future of the gig worker economy. “We need a map of Kansas City using devices we provide you. We pay nothing up front, nothing at completion, and no residuals for profits we earn from your imagery. You may not keep the equipment we provide. You are responsible for all expenses.” Who on earth would accept that Taskrabbit?
- michaelt 8y agoPresumably Google’s normal target market for the camera loans are museums, parks, shopping centres, local government tourism departments and suchlike. I.e. organisations that think it’ll be a useful marketing effort, or it’ll help their customers.
- lphnull 8y agoYou can probably justify the expenses as "travel expenses" that you would have done anyway. If I was rich and had no job AND I had an important place that needed mapping, I wouldn't mind doing this just to get to play with the gadgets.
- jarofgreen 8y agoWhile this is a cool project and congrats to the guy, seriously, Google can't even cover the expenses for him and other people who do this kind of thing? How many people do this kind of thing, and how much would it cost Google to cover them all? How much would it cost them to cover a salary for them too, even a basic one? Do we have any way of trying to make a reasonable guess at that? Maybe Tawanda was aware of this and is still happy to do it, but for that not even to be commented on in the article is kinda weird.
- ars 8y agoGoogle normally does pay people to do this. That's how most of the streets in high tech countries were mapped. This guy just wanted to record his home country and street view was a good way to fuse it with map data, and publish it widely. Google didn't ask him to do this, so why would they pay him? He wanted the photos published, Google has a place to do that.
- jarofgreen 8y agoI know Google normally do this with paid staff. But they do have a reasonably big volunteer pool too, and I think it's fair to ask about them. I've volunteered for many things before, and I know that often (as in this case, it sounds like) the volunteers do get something non-monetary out of it too. Just seemed worth commenting on, especially as the headline made such a point of how much money it was.
- michaelt 8y agoI thought the headline was about how little money it was, not how much. I thought streetview cars were $100k+ and the article was about how the technology costs have fallen. Obviously hearing the answer is “get a camera loaned for free” was a disappointment.
- Jyaif 8y agoThe same thing could be said about wikipedia btw: In 2018 they received 104 million dollars (of which 2.3 went to pay for the servers), so if they wanted, they could actually get 100 million worth of content.
- adrianN 8y agoDid he just gift the images to Google? Did he retain copyrights? Are they available under a license that would allow inclusion into an open repository of street view photos?
- smel 8y agoBack in 2014, a Moroccan guy did something similar, created a Street view clone for a 10 cities in Morocco huge challenge for one person, with limited resources: http://carte.ma/ http://carte.ma/
- tertius 8y ago"Google Trusted Photogapher" here. https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/ https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/ Verification: https://goo.gl/maps/Nx9JwEB731m https://goo.gl/maps/Nx9JwEB731m We can now add to Streetview instead of just adding to Google Maps. I.e. we can create a blue line instead of just blue dots. And a lot of us are doing it, by request, and paid. And no, Google never paid us anything, we had to sell by ourselves and set our own prices. So this guy will get paid, this is great PR.
- al_chemist 8y ago> Google never paid us anything > So this guy will get paid Who pays for that?
- tertius 8y agoBy businesses who want a tour of their business or of the road leading up to it. Mostly likely just the business premises. But there are a lot of clients in that part of the world that would want to include roads like game reserves. * I'm South African.
- Gerardd 8y agoI was impatient for Street View to reach my country so I made my own back in 2014. I took photospheres of my university campus and made a website for it using an embedded Street View container. I did it as a personal project. The university ended up discounting a reasonable chunk of my tuition as a recognition and for my effort! First I was taking individual photos on my DSLR and stiching them manually then I continued the bulk using a spare Android phone which made everything (slightly) easier (auto stiching, geo-tagged...) but I still had to stand at each point and take 18+ photos for each photosphere. You can check it on http://discoveruob.com http://discoveruob.com
- xte 8y agoWhile I may comprehend that any of those contributors must know and well understand a thing: that's a PROPRIETARY service, you pay but you do not really own ANYTHING after. So consider OpenStreetMaps (they also have a kind of streetview project) or any other kind of FREE project in witch you invest money and after co-own the data.