Google Street View Wants You to Direct New Tricycle Imager 115
An anonymous reader writes "Google is taking suggestions for where you'd like to see the new Street View Trike go. Your favorite park, hiking trail, zoo, school campus hangout or outdoor mall could be going online thanks to Google Street View's new 250 pound tricycle, complete with camera and GPS. According to the press release: 'The Street View trike began as a 20% project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team. "I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world — ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts — aren't accessible by car," says Dan. "When I'm riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it's off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can't wait to see what our users come up with."'"
Places not to go (Score:5, Insightful)
Your favorite park, hiking trail, zoo, school campus hangout or outdoor mall could be going online thanks to Google Street View...
All of my favorite places (especially hiking trails) would be way on the bottom of my list of things they should photo. Call me selfish, but a lot of my favorite places are places I can go to get away from people, and I'd like to share them as little as possible :)
Shortest path != least effort (Score:3, Insightful)
One feature that I think would be really useful, for biking especially, is to be able to find the "flattest" route between two points. Around here, they have been converting old railroad rights of way into bicycle paths, which is nice because they are extremely well-graded. But I'm not even sure where many of them are. I would probably bike more places if I knew I would only have to contend with as few hills as necessary to get there.
Does the tricycle (or the street view car) collect altitude data as well as latitude and longitude? Would it even be theoretically possible to add this in the future?
Re:Almost a Good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
We offer our engineers "20-percent time" so that they're free to work on what they're really passionate about.
So apparently Dan is really passionate about making interns lug a 250-pound tricycle all over creation. Dan must be some kind of sadist.
Re:Famous Parks (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do parks? There are millions of images of the more famous parks, tens of thousands of less famous parks - and the rest, everyone who cares about them, already have images.
How about driving it to places in the news - current events places. Phillip Garrido's home would be high on my list. Open the gates, and scope it all out. Drive around the block, through the neighbor's back yards, get everything.
I can come up with more - anyone who can't simply doesn't read the news. Screw those parks.
Re:I know where it can go.. (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea I had was to install it on all garbage trucks. The garbage truck goes down the street twice the images would mainly be early morning shots with only light traffic.
Re:SDSU (Score:2, Insightful)
Saw them on Penn State main campus in June, but last I checked we didn't have street view available yet.
http://imgur.com/kq2WY [imgur.com]