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The good things about working for Google include stuff like being able to sit there on the internet all day and say it’s genuinely for work, but the bad? How about having to wear a bright blue and green backpack and walk around in public?
The backpack is a portable version of the company’s Street View camera technology, which we’ve previously seen bolted onto bikes, trikes and its huge fleet of cars. Now it’s been made portable enough for a couple of men to sheepishly carry around on their backs, as part of a plan to map places where even bikes can’t go.
The team calls it the Street View Trekker, which is making its first appearance around the walkways of the Grand Canyon right now, recording it in the same immersive 3D quality managed by its vehicle fleet, while apparently being controlled via a custom Android app that sits on the phone of the wearer.
The end result will be like going for a walk somewhere nice, only without having to go out and raise your own heart rate above its usual steady 58bpm. [YouTube via Google]
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Can a Backpack Be Chic?
National Geographic and Mathematics
“Backpack of Shame” – fuck right off. In what way is it shameful to work for Google, to provide data for their excellent streetview service and to be paid to stroll around beautiful national parks?
Getting paid to walk around some of the most beautiful places in the world? I think I can put up with carrying an awkward backpack then..
This.
More like Backpack of Genuinely-Interesting-Job-That-People-Will-Want-To-Stop-And-Talk-To-You-About.
Couldn’t agree more. What an awesome thing google maps are and how amazing streetview is. Try travelling trough time to 10-15 years ago and presenting this idea to everyday people, everyone would think you’re crazy for suggesting something so fantastic and unachieveable.
What a true wonder of modern day technologu, and FREE
Hear hear, the shame of having a job…show some self respect & get back on the dole
quite right. at least address the spurious claim contained within your headline. lame lame lame.
One day we will never have to leave the house ever again. Reckon they should do zoo’s next.
You can already go round London Zoo, I assume they did it with the same setup. http://goo.gl/maps/7oM0m
Bloody hell
Cheers for link.
Slightly off topic. Does anyone know what Google does with old street view data? Do they keep a backup anywhere? One day in the future people are going to want to look at it as it’s a huge repository of information on life in our times.
I’ve often thought that as well. It will be almost a time machine, where people could one day, slip back into the past and see how streets used to look like. Even in the short time that Streetview has been out, many scenes have changed considerably. But imagine in 50 years from now. It just makes me sad Streetview was invented 50 years ago.
One place that would really be worthwhile is somewhere like Christchurch in New Zealand. The loveable little city is under reconstruction from the terrible earthquake, so it will look very different in 5 years from now. So many historical buildings were lost. The only shame is that due to sensitivity reasons, Christchurch never had the big update with 2009 imagery that the rest of the country had, so unless Google put this up, we will never have a real before and after set of images.
Let’s hope like Google Earth, streetview start including a time line.
Did they actually stop Google taking the pictures or just stop them being used. If the latter Google might have a copy somewhere.
No, the street view images were taken of the whole of New Zealand approx end of 2009, before the first earthquake. At the beginning of this year all of the new images were released for NZ except within the city boundary of ChCh. It was withheld for obvious sympathetic reasons – it was still quite recent after the 2nd big quake which lost a lot of lives and the new footage shows these buildings still up.
That said, time has now passed and many people believe it is long enough to finally release those images. Funny enough, not long after I posted my comment, I found an article from last month talking exactly about this. Google stated that they intend to release the images taken before the quake as a memory for both citizens and historians of the city as it once looked. They have this policy not just for ChCh, but any city or area devastated by natural disasters. They described it as a snapshot in time – exactly as in this discussion, and the importance in years to come to see how these cities have changed. So, it does indeed seem that we may have not only these images, but also a way to travel back in time sometime in the future. Google didn’t say either when they will release the ChCh imagery, nor any plans to offer a timescale ability like in Google Earth, but the way they wrote it, it certainly seemed to be in the works.
Let’s be honest though, Google makes a loss from Street View, so we may not see this in a hurry, but I do hope it comes soon.
I’d assume, due to the sheer volume of data, that the retention period for old imagery would be pretty short, if at all
If you mean in data storage space, no, I don’t really agree. Data space is so cheap these days. Technically, you or I could afford enough hardrives to store all of the street view data in the world. It would be expensive, but we, as an individual, could technically afford it.
As a large company, this is no issue for Google. Of course, they would do it differently, and probably store it all on RAID systems with multiple drives to protect against data loss, and maybe even a remote backup, but it’s not too difficult.
Also, data storage is only getting bigger all the time, with larger volumes per HD becoming both available and cheaper as time goes on. HD storage will also become a thing of the past eventually, with other methods often talked about on forums such as these finally taking off in the near future.
fair point