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Ask HN: How to Build Your Own (Mini) Google Street View?

28 points by nickreese ↗ HN
Hey all, I'm pro-bono consulting with a small European economic area and found myself thinking: "There must be someone on HN who has solved this problem."

Question: With a small budget but ample manpower how would you build a small scale Google Street View to take a snapshot of the road system and infrastructure in an area?

It seems that quotes we're receiving for GPS tagged location data (500k+) are outrageous compared to the cost of buying a camera (~20-30k) and mounting it on a truck to survey the area... then building a small dashboard to have locals tag the data.

In total there are ~300km of roads to survey.

Anyone familiar with this?

Any open source tools for managing this sort of data?

Is it crazy to think we could pull this off for a fraction of the cost?

11 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 36.4 ms ] thread
phillipseamore
Many of the Road authorities in the EU run vehicles to image their roads and surroundings with kit similar to G's Streeetview. If you are working with the local government they could reach out to RA's in neighboring countries.

Also https://www.mapillary.com/

This was also posted on HN recently: https://jakecoppinger.com/2022/12/creating-aerial-imagery-wi...

funshed
No, but I did think about it on a sleepless night ounce. Drones were not around when Google started street view. If they launched today, id envision a 'charging & control van' and several AI drones.
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tnelsond3
You can buy a Motorola z series phone for $30 on eBay and a 360 degree camera mod for $25 probably. It has two wide angle cameras that it stitches together.
piceas
Once upon a time I did something like this for about 500km of track. The first pass was to dump the images at regular intervals into google earth. It worked great. The nice part about using ge was each pin had a km reference which made it very easy for us to zoom in on what we were looking for.

If I would do it again I would dump the images into Photo Sphere Viewer and make a mini-map.

It depend what is needed, but it is conceivable to use a cheap 360 camera on a stick and log the journey with OsmAnd/whatever. If only some images/locations need to be high detail, use a normal camera for those locations. With care the images could be merged, but it's probably not worth it. Just link to it from the photo sphere.

https://photo-sphere-viewer.js.org/

martythemaniak
It's crazy how much hardware has improved since streetview was launched.

Buy an Insta 360, mount it to a car with a selfie stick. Drive around, set the camera to take a snapshot once a second. Dump images to S3, extract exif to DB, display on top of an open streets map.

You'll have to navigate using clicking on a map. With a bit of extra work, create a linked list of the images, then display buttons on each image for prev/next.

JeffreyMartin
Hi, my company offers exactly this. Data collection, stitching, anonymization, and so on. I have been doing this for over 15 years. Https://www.mosaic51.com

Get in touch, let's talk.

Stay away from the home grown solutions, they are not robust, reliable, or scalable. You'll waste a ton of time and money on them with bad results.

Our systems have been used all over the world to map entire countries with no hardware failures.

Happy to talk!