
How sheep with cameras got some tiny islands onto Google Street View - yurisagalov
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/11/07/how-sheep-with-cameras-got-these-tiny-islands-onto-google-street-view/?utm_term=.8d2dae8cd3de
======
seiferteric
Love this idea. Now I am wondering why google doesn't have an app to allow
individuals to update google street view content themselves. My house was
built this year and the maps still don't show the road or the new houses. I
would love being able to walk around the neighborhood with my phone and get an
updated map, at least until the real google car comes by.

~~~
jasode
_> Now I am wondering why google doesn't have an app to allow individuals to
update google street view content themselves._

I've always wondered if Google could partner with the US Postal Service and
piggyback off their fleet for continuous streetview updates. Those mail trucks
already drive the 99% of roads (that are not highways) every day and the maps
would get updated more often. To save money, they also wouldn't have to attach
cameras to every truck. Just move them from vehicle to vehicle on a rotational
basis to eventually cover 100% of the routes.

Heck, Google Inc probably wouldn't even have to pay all of the costs. They
could make a convincing case to the Federal government that upgrading the USPS
mail trucks with cameras would give law enforcement and civil planners up-to-
date geographic data. Therefore, they'd get a multi-billion government grant
to implement it.

Or, they could also partner with Uber/Lyft. It just seems like the USPS (or
FedEx/UPS) fleet has more consistent vehicle dimensions for attaching a multi-
camera rig.

~~~
macintux
I'm sure there would be pretty significant concerns about government
surveillance were the USPS to be recording every street every day.

~~~
jasode
_> the USPS to be recording every street every day._

Oh, I wasn't thinking that every street every day would get recorded. I don't
think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that
volume of nationwide photos. (I haven't done a back-of-the-envelope
calculation, so maybe I'm wrong and they actually can).

I was just thinking that there are many streetviews (especially rural areas)
in Google Maps captured in 2007. My street is from 2013. Using another
entity's expansive fleet of vehicles, those maps could be updated more
frequently... like once a month instead of every 4 to 10 years. Also, the USPS
trucks are already burning the gas driving all those roads so it's a waste of
fuel to have another car drive the same route just for photos.

As for fears of surveillance, it's going to depend on:

(1) if the citizens feel they also get benefit from the updated data. E.g. web
surfers on Zillow see a house for sale and they would prefer to see a
streetview of the neighborhood from last month instead of 5 years ago. Same
for scoping out a company's address for a job interview.

(2) Are USPS cameras perceived as a minor extension of traffic cameras at
every extension that citizens drive through every day and the police car dash
cams that record a continuous loop as they patrol the city? Or it's a major
step change in data collection that the public would reject. I don't know.

~~~
cobookman
Google datacenters most certainly have enough storage. I'd bet youtube uploads
more data / day than these USPS cars would.

Don't forget that the cameras on the cars would not need to have 30 fps
uploaded at 4k resolution.

~~~
jasode
Here's my back-of-envelope calculation:

Assumptions...

    
    
      4,000,000 miles of roads 
      (4.12 million minus 164,000)[1][2]
    
      5280 ft per mile
    
      200 ft as guess of distance between snapshots
    
      60,000 bytes as estimate for 1 jpg sized for "near HD"[3]
    
      15 photos per set [3]
    

... total is ~95 TB per day.[4] The Youtube stat from 2015 quoted 24 TB per
day.[5] The total Google Maps in 2012 size was 20 PB.[6]

So, 95 TB is within the realm of possiblity but it seems like coordinating the
logistics in the USA to upload that much from trucks every day would be a huge
hurdle. (The Youtube 24TB is worldwide uploads and not just USA.) Since the
vast majority of the streetview images for a particular day won't be requested
by anyone, it wouldn't be a good return-on-investment to pay for that much
disk space.

Obviously, the total goes up if I underestimated the intervals (100 ft instead
of 200 ft) or underestimated the jpg size (new generation of HD cameras output
200000 bytes for still images). The total goes down if a significant chunk of
those 4 million miles don't need streetviews. There are probably other factors
I'm missing. (What's that famous Google interview question again? _" How many
gas stations are there in the USA?"_[7])

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=miles+of+roads+in+usa](https://www.google.com/search?q=miles+of+roads+in+usa)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+miles+of+highways+i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+miles+of+highways+in+usa)

[3] [https://petapixel.com/2012/10/15/a-glimpse-of-googles-
fleet-...](https://petapixel.com/2012/10/15/a-glimpse-of-googles-fleet-of-
camera-equipped-street-view-cars/)

[4]
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((4*10%5E6)*5280%2F200...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=\(\(4*10%5E6\)*5280%2F200\)*\(15*60000\))

[5] [https://www.quora.com/How-many-terabytes-of-storage-does-
You...](https://www.quora.com/How-many-terabytes-of-storage-does-Youtube-
Google-currently-have)

[6] [https://petapixel.com/2012/06/06/google-street-view-has-
snap...](https://petapixel.com/2012/06/06/google-street-view-has-
snapped-20-petabytes-of-street-photos/)

[7]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=interview+question+how+many+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=interview+question+how+many+gas+stations)

~~~
dTal
95 TB a day would cost Google roughly a million dollars a year. For a company
that routinely makes tens of billions, it's not a gigantic amount, and I'm not
so sure they wouldn't make it back in extra views - "nearly live" Street View
would be an incredible tool. But they wouldn't even have to save all the data
for that - just keep it flowing.

As to the logistics of data transfer - why not move the data physically?
You're already carrying it around in all the mail trucks. Most of the
logistics are already taken care of by the existing postal infrastructure.
Just take the SD card out at the depo and put it on the next mail vehicle
going towards Google.

Or, to paraphrase Andy Tanenbaum, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a
postal truck with a shoebox of microSD cards hurtling down the highway".

*Fun fact - a shoebox full of 128 gigabyte microSDs has a capacity of nearly 9 petabytes!

------
quarry
Faroe Islands Translate is also another stunt by them to get their language
into google translate
[https://www.faroeislandstranslate.com/](https://www.faroeislandstranslate.com/)

------
tim333
I'm having a job finding the sheep footage on Google Maps. There's some
footpath shots here that seem human filmed
[https://www.google.com/maps/@62.1045372,-7.4263828,3a,75y,90...](https://www.google.com/maps/@62.1045372,-7.4263828,3a,75y,90h,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sfN0d_0ANzhc-p-3gbYOUjw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

~~~
s0rce
It looks like the sheepview footage was just a ploy to get google to bring the
actual streetview equipped vehicles to the island. I don't think the sheepview
data is on google maps.

~~~
torgard
That was indeed the idea, and it worked!

------
jdcarter
This makes the radio transponder I put on my cat look totally amateur by
comparison. I need to step up my game.

~~~
DonHopkins
Sharks with freaking 360 Degree X-Ray Cameras!

------
kozikow
Shameless plug: our company (tensorflight.com) works on extracting building
information from a few sources including street view. E.g. we extract a number
of stories building have based on street view image. Please get in touch at
kozikow@tensorflight.com if you have any idea for the collaboration.

~~~
chatmasta
I love the reveal effect on the landing page. Genius.

------
gowld
[2016] [https://blog.google/products/maps/sheep-view-where-theres-
wo...](https://blog.google/products/maps/sheep-view-where-theres-wool-theres-
way/)

------
amelius
Reading the headline, I thought they used iPhone users, but it turned out to
be actual sheep with cameras.

Anyway, like the article says, it is mostly a PR stunt, and I'm not very
impressed.

------
nasredin
Thanks Google, but...

There's plenty of public roads in my hometown that still don't have Street
View.

Speaking of mapping, I find that Microsoft's 45 degree satellite (aircraft?)
imagery is much more useful than straight down imagery.

~~~
kozikow
Google also have oblique (45 degree) anywhere you have a 3d model. For some
reason they do not show it in google maps and you need a separate API to see
it:
[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/aerial-
simple) .

------
chiph
Good thing they didn't use mountain goats, otherwise people would be thinking
that a 3cm wide ledge a hundred meters up is a good hiking trail to use.

------
waibelp
Google sheep view :-)

------
_joel
Please, no AMP :)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/11/07/h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/11/07/how-
sheep-with-cameras-got-these-tiny-islands-onto-google-street-view/)

~~~
infogulch
As long as it loads from the original source (washingtonpost.com not
google.com/.../washingtonpost) I actually like AMP. It loads faster for
everyone.

~~~
jwilk
AMP pages always load JS from Google.

If you disable JS, you don't get any images.

~~~
infogulch
Oh no, not from Google! You're right, I should read the original page.

Results from opening the original page, without adblock, and scrolling down to
read the article: Over 1000 requests, 30MB, and 2m later I killed it early to
save my poor browser (it's ok, FF, I won't let them do that to you again). 121
unique domains, including a dozen from google, as well as amazon, yahoo,
facebook, maybe 10 other ad networks I didn't recognize, at least 10 analytics
sites, and over a dozen separate CDNs. 2 separate auto-playing videos. As I
scrolled back up it reloaded the ad slots a _second_ time.

AMP? 145 requests and 3MB in 5s. 42 unique domains, _fewer_ google domains.
One ad. Nothing autoplayed.

Still not pretty, but I know which one I prefer. I'm not trying to argue HN
link submission policy here, I'm just saying AMP might be net good on the web
and maybe we should consider leaving it next time for the good of other
readers.

And to be fair this website probably has one of the highest adblock user
ratios of any online (both html/amp go down to 80/40 requests with uBlock
Origin enabled) so this doesn't affect _us_ as much proportionately. But at
least AMP is doing _something_ with this dumpster fire.

~~~
runeb
Weird, I tried the same with Chrome, no addons, on my MacBook from cold cache,
scrolling down and up:

294 requests | 3.1 MB transferred | Finish: 25.41s | DomContentLoaded: 685 ms
| Load: 5.39 s

You might have some crapware

~~~
infogulch
I just tried in chrome (and again in ff) and got on the same order of
magnitude of requests. 700+ for html, ~200 for amp.

No crapware, I keep my computer pretty clean (4 ext: tree tabs, ublock,
bitwarden, https everywhere). I probably just got unlucky.

------
DonHopkins
Mobile Wireless LANolin.

------
warent
So after the sheep did some recording for us, the punchline is that they were
enslaved, slaughtered, and consumed? Ha ha ha. I'm not sure how this is
supposed to be amusing. Not to say that this article should be a PETA
champion, but it's a pretty profound example of human arrogance and a complete
lack of empathy.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
how is it cruel to strap a lightweight camera to a sheep while it goes about
its daily grazing?

whether or not eating animals (in general) is ethical is a different question
altogether.

~~~
warent
The issue of the comment isn't with the camera being strapped to the sheep;
that technology is great

~~~
_jal
In other words, you'd like to hijack a discussion about an article about a
publicity stunt to talk about your personal morals?

~~~
warent
I've obviously miscommunicated here quite badly. That's something I apologize
for. Just to clarify:

1\. My intention wasn't to hijack a discussion but to create an isolated
discussion in a comment block. Hijacking, to me, would've been to reply to
every other comment with the same thing.

2\. The comment is still related to the article; specifically the rhetoric.

3\. I wasn't aware that discussing morals is frowned upon in HN.

------
fazalul92
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4719674/Wildlife-
pho...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4719674/Wildlife-photographer-
says-famous-monkey-selfie-ruined-him.html)

Its interesting how when its a regular professional photographer, he gets his
life ruined by copyright lawyers, PETA, etc. but when its Google, nobody
cares.

~~~
icebraining
He didn't "get his life ruined". He gambled his career and savings to get a
pay day and lost. As he should, since copyright is abused enough already.

~~~
fazalul92
Copyrighting photos is something thats done regularly by photographers, I see
nothing being "abused" there. How else are they supposed to make money?

~~~
wl
He was abusing copyright by claiming rights to a photo he didn't take.

~~~
soundwave106
It looks like the case referenced in the Daily Mail was settled:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/12/monkey-selfie-
cas...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/12/monkey-selfie-case-settled-
british-photographer-agrees-share/)

I personally think "abusing" copyright is too strong of a word here. The key
test on whether this sort of work is copyright worthy is the "threshold of
originality"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality)).
I can see it possible to argue this passed the threshold for the monkey selfie
case (obviously that's debatable, and the person was not successful, but it is
not a completely outrageous argument in my opinion).

It's definitely a murky area of copyright law, and one I can see increasingly
getting muddier as art becomes more and more machine assisted.

~~~
wl
Threshold of originality is not the issue here. That's more applicable to
things like security camera footage. 17 USC §102(a) confines copyright to
"works of authorship." Without an author, there is no copyright. To date, only
natural persons and corporations have been held to be authors.

