Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View | Hacker News Reader

Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View

cnet.com

164 pointscoderintherye44 comments

If you want to repeat that in your neighboorhood in a smaller scale, there's https://www.openstreetcam.org/ (software open source, content CC-BY-SA) and https://www.mapillary.com/ (propietary afaik, content CC-BY-SA)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services

Open 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.

It'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.

Do they have a guide on how to setup your rig to get best results possible?

There's a forum where the community talks about capture setup 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.

> I wonder how they're combining all of those images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_from_motion

Mapillary's open contribution (Structure from Motion pipeline):

https://github.com/mapillary/OpenSfM

The 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!

I 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

I really enjoyed clicking around and virtually touring the campus - especially knowing how much work it must have been!

What a great project, glad the university recognized your effort.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

While 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?

Presumably 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.

You 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.

I 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)

As 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.

Forgive me, I'm not up to date on Zimbabwe news. Why can't you get gas and cooking oil?

Economy is in tatters. The Zimbabwean dollar is worth less right now.

No 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).

There 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.

Currently in Zimbabwe. It's not an issue of affordability. The country allocates foreign currency to bring in fuel, there is a shortage of foreign currency and the government is struggling to bring in enough fuel to meet demand levels.

Exactly the same as when I lived there. We had the money, but we would queue round the block (even leaving cars unattended) waiting for the fuel to arrive.

No it wouldn't help. There simply isn't enough out there & quite frankly people would outpay "$5k on a passion project" for a stable supply.

> There is gas and diesel - it is just expensive for everyday folk relative to how much money they can realistically make

Do you have first hand experience from the last ~month? (since everything has collapsed again)

Friends living there who are very, very well off can not physically get their hands on a single liter of gas or diesel.

I recently spent 6 weeks driving around virtually all of Zimbabwe, I have a pretty good idea how the country works (or at least, before the most recent collapse)

Have you been to Zimbabwe? Drop a pin literally anywhere on Zimbabwe on Google maps to enter street view. The streets are full of cars and every parking space is taken.

I recently spent 6 weeks driving around virtually the whole country, yes.

In the last ~month their economy has collapsed. Their currency is worthless, and there is no gas or diesel in the country. I have plenty of friends in the country and get regular updates.

>>...there is essentially none in Zimbabwe right now

> I recently spent 6 weeks driving around virtually the whole country

I think you should have made it clearer that your initial statement was hyperbole, because if taken literally, how were you driving for 6 weeks?

The major, crippling crash has happened within the last ~8 weeks

I drove around for 6 weeks about 5 months ago, which I consider recently.

Something you need to understand about African countries is that things change fast. Much, much faster than you con comprehend if you've never spent significant time there, because our First-World minds expect things to continue on an even keel.

My statement is very much NOT hyperbole. Multiple friends who have lived their entire lives in Zim currently can't get a drop.

While 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.

Google 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.

I 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.

I 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.

The 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.

This is what really annoys me about Wikipedia - it begs for money like it's going out of business but in reality the money it gets, aside from the tiny amount that actually runs everything is basically frittered in what is little more than fraud frankly.

The difference that means I have less problems providing "free" work to Wikipedia is the open license that means others can reuse it freely. I hope Tawanda will upload all his images to one of the two open sites mentioned in this discussion as well.

Did 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?

Back 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/

"Google Trusted Photogapher" here.

https://www.google.com/streetview/hire/

Verification: 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.

> Google never paid us anything

> So this guy will get paid

Who pays for that?

By 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.

I’d love to see the vast trail systems of the US get the street view treatment.

I 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.

I’m amazed that they went into my gym.

The 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.

While 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.

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