Take A Glitch-Ridden Trip Through Google Earth | The Creators Project:
Charlie Behrens made the short film Algorithmic Architecture (above), which uses a glitch aesthetic to take the viewer on a journey using Google Earth. Using the visual discrepancy that occurs when Google Earth doesn’t compute 3D images properly Behren uses it “as a metaphor for the way that our 21st century supercities are physically changing to suit the needs of computer algorithms rather than human employees.”
Real-time Ascii Art conversion of Google Street View panorama’s done in WebGL.
There apparently is a man at Google who has strapped a 40-pound photography rig onto himself and is now hiking all over America’s scenic parks and fields. The rig contains 15 digital cameras and is juiced enough for a two-day trek in the wilds. It looks like a big robot eye or the electricity-spurting part of a Tesla coil, but it’s harmless, so don’t be alarmed if you see this guy lumbering over the ridge like a lunar astronaut.
(via Google’s ‘Street View’ Hits the Hiking Trail - Arts & Lifestyle - The Atlantic Cities)
Tons of roads and even some obscure neighborhoods have been mapped out with street view, but all too often your own front yard is left un-street-viewable. And while that may not be much of a tragedy for most people, those that would rather change that now have the option to with DIY Street View’s new Street View Camera System.
The system, which consists of an elevated 6 sensor camera, stitches together 30-megapixel images, complete with geotags, on the fly. And you can select the accessory of your choice depending on what you’re trying to map out. If you want to create a street view map of your neighborhood that people can reference for directions you can use their car mount. If, on the other hand, you’re showing your home off to potential buyers online, you can just stick the camera in DIY Street View’s specially designed backpack.
The only thing you can’t do is supplement Google Maps itself. The street views you create will be interactive in the same way, and embeddable into your own website, but that’s where the sharing ends. If you want more info on the camera system and all of the accessories available for it, head over to DIY Street Views website
The street view cars have travelled enough miles to complete 10 round trips to the moon (and then some) and have stored more than 80 times more information than is contained in the US Library of Congress.
(via Google Street View Has Snapped 20 Petabytes of Street Photos)
The random boys flipping off the camera, the villagers in England who formed a human chain to block the entry of the camera car, the ongoing debates in some countries over whether to ban Street View for perceived privacy violations—and even the street art project in Pittsburgh—all get at the problematic core of using the country as its own map. Lewis Carroll imagined the problem comically, as an objection put forth by farmers (it will block the sun!). In “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges offers a dark gloss to Carroll’s map. “The Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it,” writes Borges, will become “useless and permitted to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.” The 1:1 map, Carroll’s exuberant Grand Idea, is, to Borges, the work of an empire on the verge of decline, with nothing left to do, nowhere left to go. “In the Deserts of the West, still today,” he reports, “there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.” If Borges is right, the unwillingness of Street View’s skeptics to be captured in the grand map may be the refusal of people to be a part of just such an empire.
Google Street View is now Google Store View. A recently released feature of the well-known mapping app lets you go inside participating businesses remotely and take a look around. B&H’s giant photo and video store in Manhattan, above, is one of the first to invite Google into their establishments.
Camera Store Gets Virtual Tour From Google Street View | Raw File | Wired.com
Street View availability. The extent of Google’s view.
lines of law and commerce (by antimega)
