Google Treks
google.com
google.com
On a more hand-made note, my company, http://360cities.net, has been publishing user-generated 360º imagery since 2006. I have built a tour of my own city, Prague, starting in 2004, which was before Google Maps or Streetview. We now have hundreds of thousands of images, (all high-resolution, completely spherical 360º photos) from every country of the world, including some very remarkable places in Antarctica, skydiving from an airplane, underwater, "remote" places such as Havana, Iran, Tibet, Burma, Easter Island, and so on.
Our "editors' picks" are something I'm really proud of. https://www.360cities.net/search/@tags-editorspicks
here is our world map. zoomed out, you should see only "great" stuff: http://www.360cities.net/map
Other services that are similar to 360cities include http://viewat.org, http://roundus.com, http://arounder.com, http://photosynth.net.
Then there are the services for iphone/android 360º app, but these images are far lower in quality overall: http://occipital.com/360/verse and http://dermandar.com/worldmap
edit: made all links clickable
I hope they create a more streamlined version soon.
I love google's products and the fact that they all work together but everything seems to be running slower than it ever has before.
Looking at the comments below, it is pretty clear that other people are also having this issue.
It takes a lot for me to stop what I am doing, and move over to Bing so if I am doing it, other people are doing it as well.
They should put making all of their applications less CPU intensive at the top of their list, right away.
===Also, while I am complaining about Google products, the google news doesn't let me easily search by time anymore which has also forced me over to bing. Articles from 30 days ago are rarely useful.
New maps are completely unusable. It's shocking. My computer is faster than most computers. Maps shouldn't fail on it.
I switched back to classic maps. The option is on the right hand side. You may have to clear your cache to make it permanent.
http://www.tacx.com/en/products/trainers/i-genius-multiplaye...
http://www.cycleops.com/en/products/software/virtual-trainin...
http://www.minoura.jp/english/trainer-e/option-e/cogmon-e.ht...
Cycling on indoor trainers is boring without some sort of incentive.
Imagine if we had these kind of views of, say, the streets of London in 1900? This is worth doing for history's sake alone.
For one, yeah, "what if" we had these kind of views for the streets of London in 1900? I doubt many would care, same as not many care for 1900 music, 1900 books, 1900 photographs and such. Some scholars maybe.
Second, what the parent said goes beyond that. Essentially he says, the people of 2200 could have the streets of 2100 fully 3D imaged, but empty of life, with people of 2100 mostly staying at home and merely doing VR walks.
Now this might sound far-fetched and implausible, but not much more than telling 1900 people that in 100 years there would be cities were people rarely walk in public to go about their business but mostly go around with their cars.
Judging from sales numbers, 90% of the population could not care less.
You seem unable to grasp that something might be irrelevant TO most people (as in: they could not care less about it) and still relevant IN ITSELF.
Plus, science is a bad example, because it's totally unlike history or classical music. Someone not caring about science still comes into contact every day with products of science, they shape his life in major deegree, the economy he lives in, his health, his food, etc.
With classical music or history, people can forget about them and nothing happens to them (well, apart from them being less educated, but since most other people are too hardly anyone notices).
Everything you're saying now is obvious, which is why I asked why you're bothering to make this point. It seems like you're just being argumentative for no reason.
The same way most people don't care about archeological museums, old music and old books. How many copies do history books sell in your B&N, compared to cooking, self-help, crime novels and such?
At best, people watch some documentary on TV or visit a museum and quickly move on with their lives none the wiser.
(I, for one, do. I revel in old stuff, from Plato to the Retronaut website. And I'm doing a project with reconstructed ancient greek music. But people who care about such stuff are mostly outliers).
You haven't seen the many-thousands upvoted threads of mashups of various locations in WWII and modern day? Or the sourcebooks that designers use for all the costume drama on TV and in movies?
EDIT: Here's an example Imgur thread. (http://imgur.com/a/2rNrn)
I mean, if the best you can come up as "value most people get from historical data" is photo montages of WWII/now and better designed costumes for period movies..
What I need is something like a youtube of a high speed (maybe 30 mph equiv?) run down the trail.
I'm looking for stuff like hazards and issues. Like, oh, look, a swamp, either bug spray or forget it. Oh, look, a cliff, well thats very scenic but I'm not taking the kids there. Oh look, a whole field of poison ivy, best remember to corral the kids around there. Oh look, a blind corner and adjacent highway crossing, need to keep the kids under somewhat tighter control in that area. Oh look, picnic tables, guess where the kids are stopping to eat lunch?
Another obvious problem is the county I live in has at least 100 miles of trails either cross country or in parks, and the Mighty GOOG has ... the grand canyon. Well thats nice but I'm hiking a short segment of the ice age trail this saturday, not the grand canyon. Someday the streetview-like trail tech will be useful to me, but for years I suspect it'll be merely aspirational. It would be like having streetview for streets... but only in Mountain View.
On the other hand the city I live in has three separate rails-to-trails conversions within 2 miles of my house and a riverwalk. Every little county park seems to pride itself on having elaborate marked hiking trails. In a land with lots of rivers every "three taverns and a gas station" village hovel seems to have some kind of riverwalk, aside from the big one in my hometown. Just one of the state-level parks in my county has 29 miles of hiking trails. I wasn't kidding about just my little county (well, little county as in half the surface area of Rhode Island) having 100s of miles of hiking trails.
I would like to hike a national park someday, but its so much easier (and cheaper!) to visit a local trail.
I had to decide between taking a shorter trip and missing out because of being overly cautious, or taking the longer trip I planned on.
I ended up putting in downstream and paddled upstream to see them, and they turned out to be pretty big - lots of whitewater and 3 foot drop, something I would not have done alone and without a helmet.
Being able to actually see a picture would allowed me to make a much more informed decision. Pictures really are worth a thousand words.
On a serious note, in the footsteps of OpenStreetMap that could be a great next community project: write the software for the infrastructure and the camera gear, open the designs of data collecting hardware (for the 3D printers) and let people upload their treks.
> Where do I apply
I think they will post your copyright text somewhere in some corner, giving you some pixels of fame.
Of course it's even better here: Street View is part of maps which is a real business for Google, and they even added ads to map searches recently. It's also part of the Android maps offering.
Plus they get to keep the data anyway, so they'll eventually use those for AR, Google Glasses, and what have you. Oh, and the GPS data recorded by the Street View equipment also add data to regular maps and fix mapping inconsistencies.
Seriously though, this is better done by locals who knows the place than by some Google minions.
I think the business model will be selling it to famous landmarks and malls, who have to do it for brand reasons (and then trickle down on the famous scale). See the examples, Burj Khalifa (big ugly tower), Everest, Grand Canyon, Venice, highly touristic places.
Expect Eiffel tower, Liberty Island, not beautiful "treks".
This is essentially correct. Google makes money via providing access to content created by other's.
Try "Who Owns the Future" by Jaron Lanier. It's an interesting read.
Have these been removed due to patents?
It's nice what can be done with Internet these days but I prefer the old quick Google with almost the same features but less shine.
* Edit: I only meant to agree that these specific Trek sites feel very slow, not "all Google services."
Edit: damn, we need more people like jwz.
[1]: http://www.google.com/loon/#utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc...
I would like to try something like this just to test what kind of "being there" feeling would be achievable with the current tech.
It's like they ran the text in google translate and never bothered to check the results.
Arabic speakers exists in nearly every country where there are Muslims. Which is what nearly 30% of the world population?
It seems both inevitable, interesting, and on topic.
Using census records I found the house some of my ancestors lived in about a century ago. The neighborhood has gone, uh, dramatically downhill since then, I wouldn't go there today without kevlar and a rifle, but it was interesting to view the original mostly unmodified house on streetview.
There is also a whole "urban explorer" subculture out there and legally obtained pix of ruins would be interesting.
Don't want to sound too negative but wondering if Trek would get any attention if done by some startup.
It would not be as good as streetview though.
And if you scripted a time limit for images, e.g. only within a few hours, you'd heavily limit the amount of usable images you had.
With "agents in the field" Google could potentially update its feeds whenever and as often as it needed. The difference would be having an in-house image-generating infrastructure or...well...tag-searching Instagram.
edit: believe it was related to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669688/googles-photo-tours-sugg...
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/04/visit-global-land...
Do not forget who we're dealing with, Google gave the NSA unrestricted access to every system without any legal challenge. No amount of pretty photos will make up for that.