DIY kit is taking the Google Street View cam to the streets

By Molly McHugh June 8, 2012

This week, Google unveiled its updates to Maps, preempting the Apple announced we all know is coming and giving us a look at some of its new features. While the new 3D capabilities and offline support announcements (and editorial echoes of “will this fend off Apple?”) were focus points, Google also showed up a new Street View mechanism.

The Street View Trekker is a backpack Google has outfitted traveler Googlers with to start mapping terrain off the beaten path. Bike lanes, walking paths, public transit, and of course roads have all long been included in the Google Maps experience, but the idea is to introduce trails, mountain hikes, or little known short-cuts to the application. These are places the Google cars (self-driving or no) can’t get to, and for the most part bikes might not cut it either. Thus, the Street View cam bearing backpack is capturing the footage.

But the task doesn’t have to be a Google-dedicated one, thanks to German company Streetview Technology. The company is selling a DIY Street Trekker kit that will allow you contribute to the project. The kit includes the Street View camera, an image processing server (which stitches your photos together and adds location metadata), the Google custom Street View player so you can enable the shots to work interactively online, and the backpack (which you buy separately). The site includes setup instructions and you’re welcome to use its support team as a resource.

If you want to go with a more classic approach to Google Street View mapping, you can opt for the car mount.

Streetview Technology’s page is down at the moment, but if you’re curious about pricing, send an email to sales@diy-streetview.com. No price tags are available on the site, and it’s easy to imagine it’s going to cost you.

Right now the DIY Street View cam kit is for private use only, but it would make sense for Google to try and get in on all the data being created. It’s crowd-sourcing for Maps, which seems like something Google would be all about. All the hidden shortcuts and hikes in someone’s personal catalog would be publicly available, and Maps would be that much richer.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Entertainment

AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."