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Comment by nixos | Hacker News Reader

I understand that it's a volunteer effort, and volunteers don't have the hardware required for even 180 degree view, but most pictures are taken out of the front of the car, limiting its worth (2/3 of the picture is road, not the houses on the side).

It would be more useful if people stuck two phones (one on each side of the car) to take pictures of the passing buildings rather than road

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When it comes to "useful", the important question is "useful to _whom_". To a mapper, even a single photo well geocoded is a valuable source of information and its presence on a system like OpenStreetView (or even Mapillary) is extremely useful as a record of the original source.

Seeing as, for now at least, you need to have an OpenStreetMap account to contribute to OpenStreetView, it's pretty clear that the initial target market for usefulness is mappers.

Wonder whether you could use something like this:

https://theta360.com/en/about/theta/s.html

Or whether there are any affordable 360 degree cameras which exist.

We're in the process of adding 360 camera support.

Yes - there's the LG 360 Cam, which I've got and which is (generally) a lovely bit of kit. The Ricoh Theta is similar though more expensive, and Samsung do the Gear 360 but it's less pocketable.

I've got a Theta S and it's a wonderful, simple piece of kit. Obviously one of the drawbacks of most handheld 360 devices in this context is you'll be in the shot, unless you mount it out of view and use the app to take the picture - which is a bit of a faff to ensure on the fly.

Some phones come with very good "wide-angle" cameras. Not 180, but similar to what a GoPro gives. Ever since I got one, I've been amazed at how I ever got by with a crappy "boxed-in" field of view camera on a phone.

With the wide-angle view, even pointing it forwards you can get quite a bit of the surrounding area.

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