Google Loans Cameras To Volunteers To Fill Gaps in 'Street View' (knpr.org) 37
NPR explains why a man "applied to borrow a 360-degree camera through Google's Street View camera loan program."
Kanhema, who works as a product manager in Silicon Valley and is a freelance photographer in his spare time, volunteered to carry Google's Street View gear to map what amounted to 2,000 miles of his home country. The Berkeley, California, resident has filled in the map of other areas in Africa and Canada as well.... Google says it has "largely mapped" only 87 of nearly 200 countries on the platform, which launched in 2007. Many other countries on the planet have at least some Street View coverage, Google says. But there are sizable gaps in regions like Africa, Antarctica and Central Asia, while areas such as the U.S. and Europe are mostly filled in.
While users can see almost every street corner in places such as Paris or New York, they can't do the same for Algiers, Algeria, or Kabul, Afghanistan. "We start in the large metropolitan areas where we know we have users, where it's easy for us to drive and we can execute quickly," says Stafford Marquardt, a product manager for Street View. He says the team is working to expand the service's reach. To do that, Google often relies on volunteers who can either borrow the company's camera equipment or take photos using their own. Most images on Street View are collected by drivers, and most of these drivers are employed by third parties that work with Google. But when it comes to the places Google hasn't prioritized, people like Kanhema can fill in the gaps...
All this is a lot of work, but for Kanhema, it's a hobby. Google doesn't pay him or the other volunteers -- whom the company calls "contributors" -- for the content they upload. Kanhema, for example, spent around $5,000 of his own money to travel across Zimbabwe for the project. "What motivates me is just being that constant nudge on these companies and this system to pay attention to those parts of the world," he says.
Craig Dalton, an assistant professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University, says Google's business model plays a big role in which places are added to Street View first. "Google Maps is not a public service. Google Maps is a product from a company, and things are included and excluded based on the company's needs," Dalton says. "Sometimes that means that things are excluded that have a lot of merit but that don't fit the business plan..." Although the company's end goal is to make a global street map, Kanhema is unsure when places like his hometown would be visible on the platform without volunteered images. "There's not always going to be a business case to tell the story of how people live across the world," he says.
The volunteer contributors to Street View can sometimes receive funding from tourism boards or travel agencies, according to the article, but Street View's product manager adds that Google currently has no plans to compensate its volunteers. He says instead that Google compensates its volunteer contributors "in a lot of other ways" by offering "a platform to host gigabytes and terabytes of imagery and publish it to the entire world, absolutely for free."
While users can see almost every street corner in places such as Paris or New York, they can't do the same for Algiers, Algeria, or Kabul, Afghanistan. "We start in the large metropolitan areas where we know we have users, where it's easy for us to drive and we can execute quickly," says Stafford Marquardt, a product manager for Street View. He says the team is working to expand the service's reach. To do that, Google often relies on volunteers who can either borrow the company's camera equipment or take photos using their own. Most images on Street View are collected by drivers, and most of these drivers are employed by third parties that work with Google. But when it comes to the places Google hasn't prioritized, people like Kanhema can fill in the gaps...
All this is a lot of work, but for Kanhema, it's a hobby. Google doesn't pay him or the other volunteers -- whom the company calls "contributors" -- for the content they upload. Kanhema, for example, spent around $5,000 of his own money to travel across Zimbabwe for the project. "What motivates me is just being that constant nudge on these companies and this system to pay attention to those parts of the world," he says.
Craig Dalton, an assistant professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University, says Google's business model plays a big role in which places are added to Street View first. "Google Maps is not a public service. Google Maps is a product from a company, and things are included and excluded based on the company's needs," Dalton says. "Sometimes that means that things are excluded that have a lot of merit but that don't fit the business plan..." Although the company's end goal is to make a global street map, Kanhema is unsure when places like his hometown would be visible on the platform without volunteered images. "There's not always going to be a business case to tell the story of how people live across the world," he says.
The volunteer contributors to Street View can sometimes receive funding from tourism boards or travel agencies, according to the article, but Street View's product manager adds that Google currently has no plans to compensate its volunteers. He says instead that Google compensates its volunteer contributors "in a lot of other ways" by offering "a platform to host gigabytes and terabytes of imagery and publish it to the entire world, absolutely for free."
I wish these people would donate their time (Score:5, Interesting)
to OpenStreetMap instead.
Yes just upload to OpenStreetCam, retain copyright (Score:5, Informative)
if people would upload to places like openstreetcam then they would retain copyright while allowing others to benifit
for the difference between OpenStreetCam (OSC) and Mapillary (comercial but better than Google) see : https://github.com/openstreetcam/openstreetcam.org/issues/60
download the app and try it out :
itune app [improveosm.org]
google play [google.com]
try it out and have some fun !
regards
John Jones
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Most people contribute using their smartphones so the images are indeed not 360 degrees. But some people do contribute 360 images [mapillary.com].
The thing is nobody can afford to have hundreds of cars driving around for months on end. Not even Microsoft Bing has a coverage that's as good as Google. But with the improvements in hardware (GPS & 360 cameras), and interest by cities (AI-driven rapid inventory [mapillary.com] of street equipment [mapillary.com]), things should get better.
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I tried it, but it isn't really usable as an alternative to Google. The problem is the viewer as much as the data. There's no easy way to just follow a route and see images as you go. The best you can do is click a point, and see a list of traces that passed nearby. Then you can follow one of those traces, but there's no way to say, "Turn here," even if they've got perfectly good imagery for the cross street from a different trace. Someone needs to make a usable viewer for it.
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To be fair their goal is not really to make a competitor to Google StreetView: instead what they want (afaiu) is to amass a lot of images to train their deep-learning algorithm so they can sell services to various government and local agencies to tell them which traffic signs are where, where the street manholes are, where trashcans are located to help them organize collection routes, etc. They also provide this information (speed limits, one-way roads, weight limits, etc.) so it can be integrated with Open
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to OpenStreetMap instead.
Why not both?
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It would really be better for everyone but Google if OSM had better data than Google.
If history is any indication, Google will eventually hide some or all of that data behind a paywall.
Google doesn't really deserve help.
This is Zimbabwe (Score:1)
Most probably he has bigger problems than "his personal data" and all this crap. This is a way to help real users to see the map on a real place, not a "open source great ideia" that no one uses.
And in the off chance that his life, his family and his society is great, as "we" are used to have.... who would loan a camera?
Sure, google will be the winner. But OTOH they will have a map app to use, the same map app that most of the world uses and rely on. Thanks to this guy.
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Antarctica (Score:2)
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There is some StreetView imagery of places like McMurdo [google.com]. Looks pretty desolate, but that's another matter.
...laura
Gig economy at is best (Score:5, Insightful)
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Tell me about it. These volunteers giving stuff away are crazy! /Posted from my machine running 100% open source software.
correct bad data (Score:1)
When traveling from my house using ride share, I almost always have to tell the driver how to get out of my neighborhood as the maps almost always given them the mo
Re:correct bad data (Score:5, Insightful)
No, both are necessary these days. Street View is incredibly useful if you're traversing the streets... on the street. An overhead satellite view is not very helpful - knowing what's on the roof isn't as useful as knowing what the building looks like when you're driving down the road.
And yes, I've used Street View and equivalent to see what a location might look like - given an address tells you nothing about parking, about where you might turn in to get to the lot, what the entrance looks like, etc. Also useful knowing what the road signs look like when going down the road because sometimes a GPS direction can be vague, or the road signs are confusing.
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Google uses streetview data to enhance its maps. It knows which house is number 37 because its AI read the number off the front door. I knows where the main entrance to a shop is because the AI saw it, and won't send you round the corner to the wrong place. In countries where accurate signage data isn't available it can read all that too.
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Wrong. I use street view so that I can identify the building/house that I have never been to before. I have used street view for checking out routes I want to take when doing a bike ride. Let's me know if there are side walks, if the traffic is heavy, or how bad the condition of the street.
Seriously, haven't you ever had to go someplace(doctor/business) that you have never been to befo
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Street view is a mostly a luxury for voyeurs and other perverts
You know this is street view and not back yard orgy view right? I mean Occam's Razor man, you're a pervert looking to get off do you
a) trawl through street view on the hope that somewhere some person in short shorts is sharp enough to spank your junk to, or
b) go to imagefap and type "voyeur" in the search to see what new content was posted today.
Although maybe people have a fetish for pixellated and blurry images. I'm not judging.
Support Mapillary instead! (Score:1)
It's OpenStreetMap's StreetView equivalent, and just starting to get useful.
(Works great with OSMand.)
Why would I instead do free work, so a kraken monster can make a profit?
This is going to be gamed (Score:2)
If Street View solicited photographs from the general public without compensation for filling in specified blank areas on the map, this would immediately become an advertise-my-business or advertise-my-town input. We would get multiple views of everyone's diner and hardware store. We would get carefully edited views of Podunk, with the bad neighborhoods skipped or cleaned up, with careful emphasis on businesses that were most active in the Chamber. We might get Photoshopped images of what Main Street is sup
Don't forget who Google is (Score:2)
Pay attention (Score:1)
What motivates me is just being that constant nudge on these companies and this system to pay attention to those parts of the world
That is a extremely odd way to define "pay attention". The guy is carrying a camera that uploads photos and location info top an electronic database. The data are then retrieved when a search is performed. It seems to be that Google is "paying attention" in no way at all here, as likely no human at Google ever sees the photos or interacts with any of the info in any way, unless a human on the other end of the query complains.
br> For Google these places just represent a hole in their global dataset. I
"Pay attention to these parts of the world"? (Score:2)
Kanhema, for example, spent around $5,000 of his own money to travel across Zimbabwe for the project. "What motivates me is just being that constant nudge on these companies and this system to pay attention to those parts of the world," he says.
A strange idea, that Zimbabwe's problems are somehow magically going to get better if you go around systematically photographing every square inch of it.
I'm not saying that it *couldn't* be of some theoretical use, in some way, indirectly... But if you made a list of the top 1,000 strategies for solving Zimbabwe's problems, this strategy would not be at the top of that list, to put it mildly.
What? (Score:1)
Lets see, I have a few weeks of vacation time, and $5000 burning a hole in my pocket. What to do, what to do. Oh, I know, I'll DONATE IT TO THE RICHEST FUCKING COMPANY ON THE PLANET. What a moron - next time take your time and money to your hometown's food kitchen and spend your time and money where it will actually help, you know, people instead of some greedy ass corporation.
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Sure, but don't stop me when I claim that like anyone receiving donated goods and services, I insist that Google pay taxes on the $12,000-$15,000 worth of donations they got from that person. And don't stop me from telling Google I want them to pay the fucking taxes they owe, not use a double-dutch sandwich to avoid them. And don't stop me from advocating to change US law to turn that avoidance illegal.
Or you could just let sheep do it (Score:2)