Google Maps launches Street View in India
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Personally I feel Thai and Lao are harder to tell apart (I've resorted to: Lao is more curvy, Thai uses more straight lines), and also how to tell apart Czech from Slovakian, or Danish from other Nordic languages. Of course there are other ways to tell where you are, and if you only rely on written language you will not become a great player.
I'd watch GeoRainbolt[1] and all the pros that play in his tournaments.
(They're busy commentating, and they're not dedicated GeoGuessr streamers. It's understandable.)
But even if they could, it will still be harder when it comes time to differentiate between Hindi / Gujarati / Marathi / Bangla etc, which is why I'm looking forward to it.
It’s quite trivial as a layman American who has lived in Scandinavia to tell Danish apart for Swedish (one immediate dead giveaway is usage of ø in Danish vs ö in Swedish). But apparently Danish and Norwegian in written form are almost indistinguishable, so reliance on cultural usage of words must be necessary
But yeah this is probably with the written language/static imagery so please ignore, move along. :)
Only Czech: ě, ř, ů
Only Slovak: ä, ľ, ô
Tamil is a completely distinct script.
Tamil is used in signs/boards in several southasian countries (Southern state of Tamilnadu and other southern states, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore). Particularly in Sri Lanka, due to its official language status, it is possible to to lead to ambiguity in GeoGuessr between India and Sri Lanka. Contextual clues can generally rule out Malaysia and Singapore. So, I can understand the ambiguity between Sri Lankan Tamil and Tamil used in India at script level, but Bangla and Tamil have such distinct scripts that there are simple heuristics you can use to disambiguate.
Example for visual comparison:
https://translate.google.co.in/?sl=auto&tl=ta&text=I%20love%...
https://translate.google.co.in/?sl=auto&tl=bn&text=I%20love%...
https://translate.google.co.in/?sl=auto&tl=si&text=I%20love%...
Curiously, I just checked gmaps and it appears to look normal now. This must have happened in the past few months, not sure why I can't seem to find any info online.
[1]https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/one-thing-north-k...
It was done for the right reasons - security. You don't want foreign governments to have data on physical government assets, especially military and critical infrastructure. Moreover, the Google street view vans also collect other data (including scanning for WiFi networks and collecting associated metadata) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285928324_The_Googl... ... I think it also collected atmospheric data (pollution levels etc).
As for Google collecting data itself, it's only collecting photographic imagery that anyone else can.
As I ELI5-ed in another comment:
To understand the hesitancy of the government, recall if you've come across any secure government facilities any where in the world - most such infrastructure will have a common warning painted or posted publicly stating "Photography is prohibited / not allowed". Allowing the process of collecting street view data (i.e. taking photographs / videos of a locality) by foreign companies would make such warning redundant and a joke, even if they didn't use the data in their applications - they are not even supposed to have such data in the first place.
Yes, terrorist and spies can certainly try to reconnaissance a secure facility themselves. But obviously the job will be harder to do undetected given the security guards and cameras. In fact, in the 26/11 terrorist attack on Mumbai, one of the terrorists caught mentioned that they had used Google Earth to familiarise themselves with the locality before they attacked - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks . Once that was revealed, there were immediately comments on how Google Satellite view is a threat to indian security. But the indian government didn't ban Google Maps satellite views because they understood this technology has become mainstream and they just reviewed their security policies and adapted it. With street views too, the government has finally come up with a decent policy - allow indian companies to collect and process the data, let the intelligence agencies review the data to remove sensitive information or even put in fake data to confuse anyone with nefarious intentions against India, and then allow anyone (including foreign companies) to license and use the data. That's a very decent compromise that Google should be happy with.
https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collec...
Anyway, it was fixed/changed last year! https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/rb6gua/google_m...
Ref - https://web.archive.org/web/20110629104228/http://hken.ibtim...
It seems like something that could potentially be made much cheaper with a collection of drones with 360 cameras. they could all be programmed to fill out areas relatively quickly I think. It might not be street height which would be a bit of a loss, but an open dataset (with appropriate face/license plate/etc filtering) would be worth that I think.
There's also OpenDroneMap, which is more drone-focused and captures full 3d point clouds, but that still isn't quite the same as what you're proposing.
The 360 cameras are cheap but getting things accurately localized (if you care about that) and having LiDAR like google has (also if you care about this) is a bit more expensive.
I think one promising route might be to stick a 360 camera on some random cars in exchange for a fee (similar to how ads are put on top of Ubers/Taxis). I bet you could cover a city pretty quick that way, as long as you figure out how to offload the data. Maybe an agreement with a taxi company to plug into the top of the cars a couple times a week.
(I'm not blaming it on the people, although I think littering is a choice; almost certainly this is a top-down problem, where corruption in all levels of government is bleeding so much financing away from the people that public services are not operating anywhere close to their potential.)
The security concerns may be overblown (although I can understand why given so many terror attacks in the past), but stopping non-Indian companies from mapping the country so rest of world shouldn’t see the littering sounds like nonsense.
Obviously. But it's considerably easier for anyone with an internet connection to now be able to take a virtual tour; thus, it is much more exposed.
What the street views illustrate is how far behind the key infrastructure is. With a population that is motivated and willing to work hard, it suggests failures at the government level. This has been a global topic for 10 years, but it does not seem to have changed much (while the population has significantly increased).
Street views everywhere just make it easier for management failures to be seen and analyzed. This will hopefully result in some changes and improvements.
However, on the global corruption scale, India is "not so bad". Even so, "not so bad" when applied to a billion+ people is bad.
Governments haven’t cared about failures when actual users of the infrastructure (Indian citizens) have complained. Things aren’t going to change because Google is now showing how streets look like for someone outside India.
One can hope that the ease of checking up on ground-level progress would help speed improvement, because global financing organizations might require some OKRs as a condition of participating in financing things or providing aid.
Yeah like India has the highest terror attack rate in the world.
I disagree. Granted Thailand is big, and Bangkok itself is huge, so I've only seen small parts of a few cities in the country. But while I definitely saw poverty and ramshackle structures, litter was relatively minor. In fact, I've seen worse litter in places in some regions of western Europe. I've definitely seen some bad litter in places in large US cities.
I've never seen anything like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7O0jbTRD7Y
edit - I challenged myself to try to find some really dirty parts of bangkok in street view. I didn't find a good example yet, but I had to laugh when while searching for an example of litter, I instead found a woman cleaning trash - https://www.google.com/maps/@13.7627877,100.4965608,3a,64.2y...
This is from a few years ago— https://youtu.be/hufC33MvmSw
With some quick searching, I found estimates that the US per capita generates between 2 and 7 kg of waste per day per person. Thailand's number is less than 2kg.
I think the special challenge of a city like Bangkok is how rapidly it grew. But as evidenced by improvements in public transport over the last decade, I wouldn't be surprised if waste management had also improved. So perhaps it was much dirtier in the past.
And let's not forget tourism. 22 million people visit Bangkok per year, compared to 14 million for NYC. That's a lot of extra garbage that probably is not counted in the per capita figured.
They have footpaths?
And that attack was largely coordinated thanks to extensive recce of the city by David headley.
Security concerns were valid because the government had the infrastructure to check the legitimacy of every foreigner entering the country. But a Headley-like recce could be possibly done by anyone from anywhere without the government knowing it.
Yes, there are workarounds, but The government was not wrong in taking it's time in giving clearance to something like this
Given the population density, once all the faces and number plates are blurred out the street views are a lot more blurry. But I am really excited to see this.
See
- Organic Maps
- OsmAnd
- mapy.cz
Note: Google has clearly better car routing and shop listings.
But for cycling or hiking OSM is typically superior.
And you can fix map if something is wrong.
What? What makes you think this is unacceptable in the US?
I think most Americans prefer to be independent and not have to ask someone, but it's not really that rare.
And many hikers care A LOT about hiking and their maps. Hiking and cycling data in OSM is extremely good, as result of many such people being interested in project - as mappers and as users of data, including software creation.
Open Street map exists as a dataset to build alternatives on, and I've seen a few like Maps.me which are pretty decent. But it does require crowd sourcing.
Nice case of how open sourcing was useful.
UPD: yes, they do, and these seem to be much better tailored at local audience from the first glance.
Sure there is OSM, but apart from pure locations (which are community led afaik) I don't know of any good reliable service for navigation not reliant on Google.
Edit: Apart from Apple Maps as well. Just in case someone points out the major competitor.
Hopefully some real competitor emerges.
- Organic Maps
- OsmAnd
- mapy.cz
Note: Google has clearly better car routing and shop listings.
But for cycling or hiking OSM is typically superior.
In the US, there will be the occasional problem where some local street detail is wrong, but things like inter-city routing work great. You can do it on device with several different apps, and there are several different providers selling route calculation as a service that use OpenStreetMap data.
But the problem with vendor locked services is that they tend to go down with the vendor. That's why we need a separation between the OS providers, device manufacturers and software providers.
Wanna withdraw money from a Post Office? Be prepared to return back empty-handed because "Link down" or gov. employees watching cricket matches.
That won't work well with geoguessr, were you like to "drive" along a road for a while looking at signs.
Only the Instagram account is still up, at the moment, which doesn't do justice to the large panoramas. This development might make me revisit the project, get some fresh locations, and upload the larger photos.
End of the road https://www.google.com/maps/@23.0390469,88.8844274,3a,60y,23...
Are they trying to say that now it will become a formal effort to send cameras down every street in every city?
You'll have to do it several times, because usually not all years are done at once, and not all angles. I think I had to report it five times or so.
Or your sister posts a pic of herself on Instagram, showing a quarter of the house-front. Some random creep who recognizes the locality can use street-view to narrow down where she lives. All from the comfort of his own home.
Looking at Google Maps in India right now, I'm seeing a lot of blank/black views, and navigation along streets seems broken. So maybe they had to implement custom logic for this, and it isn't fully baked.
Some prominent, touristy street views that Google publicised in India includes - Red Fort, Delhi ( https://www.google.co.in/maps/@28.6559308,77.23832,3a,75y,10...? ) and Gwalior Fort, Madhya Pradesh ( https://www.google.co.in/maps/@26.2296974,78.1691643,2a,75y,... ) ...
https://www.androidpolice.com/apple-google-street-view-germa... is a pretty good writeup on things.