

Early Days on Street View - mholt
http://ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com/2014/07/early-days-on-street-view.html

======
softgrow
Pages Jaunes (Yellow Pages France) had street view in March 2002. I used it to
work out how to get from the train station to accommodation on arrival. Two
problems though on arrival train partial strike so travel agent arranged a car
and Page Jaunes assumed a side exit of Les Halles railway station was the main
one. Still earlier than 2005, and to quote archive.org "2 200 000 photos de
villes"
[https://web.archive.org/web/20020326031423/http://photos.pag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020326031423/http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/)
and voila!
[https://web.archive.org/web/20061130215611/http://photos.pag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20061130215611/http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/1/c/tbf/user=ciweb;uri=fUTX2MwEBgEwkP2TsqIHH4eE5LTWJ+4ToFEsAyPkKw0p+fj/0ZR13n3I64MxCbJX8/YOafKvvlfPeVrSmySYP0aTVEsVi6IdeSIUzCu9i8yDL+/9WQ87nWHpR8rdR3ZHbjuOVlrCSLKDAJU+3lfvtd5uVMd3jyDaHy9gRdbfuiTOV20LSzscxw==)
and
[https://web.archive.org/web/20051012124517/http://photos.pag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051012124517/http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/1/c/tbf/user=pjphoto;uri=eaXxyuHMF4JzfqnMYt7DQ+O0dIL53V+dOPm4HNDC4CnFvkNO8RYVrcLFE2A8UaTVYR1U+/PjHt8=)

~~~
doxcf434
So you could actually walk down the street like SV? In 2002? Wow.

~~~
softgrow
I went through old emails and I was using it in early February 2003, so not
quite 2002. I showed it to a number of people and some said, well, it's
interesting but will never take off, others thought it looked really useful.
One comment "Hey there is a boulangerie (bakery) right where you are
staying!", this is cool. (Pity the bakery went on holidays just as we
arrived). As others pointed out it was buildings only, so I knew what to
expect to my left and right, but had, for example no idea how wide Boulevard
de Sebastapol was but I did know there is a KFC on the left (still is looking
at Streetview now). One good thing about the pagesjaunes solution was that
they walked rather than drove the streets. As my journey was along Rue Berger
(from Chatelet les Halles heading towards the Pompidou Centre), the 2014
Streetview experience is pretty hit and miss.

Still I thought it was cool, and even took a bunch of photos (Digital, brand
new Sony Mavica writing to CDRs in the camera) of the walk from the station,
duplicating what I saw before setting out.

------
frik
_WiFi packet payloads:_

> So in theory, we should have just grabbed the header. However, a single
> wrong line in the configuration file caused us to grab the packet payload
> too. Had we ever audited the data on the disks, we would have found the bug
> and fixed it, but... nobody ever noticed. Oops.

That is Google's official opinion of the story.

Some european countries (Germany, Austria) bag to differ. Google captured all
WiFi data (unencrypted & encrypted). As a result of the _war-driving_
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_driving](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_driving)
) Google StreetView cars were banned in these countries (Google had to delete
the harddrives) and as a result there is a huge empty spot on the StreetView
coverage in central Europe (only a few cities in Germany, no street coverage
at all in Austria):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_in_Europe#Co...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_in_Europe#Controversy)
. Some attacked the car:
[http://www.austriantimes.at/news/General_News/2010-04-08/223...](http://www.austriantimes.at/news/General_News/2010-04-08/22317/'Google_Street_View'_driver_escapes_axe_attack)

one of many news articles about this issue on heise.de (German):
[http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Datenschuetzer-
Street...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Datenschuetzer-Street-View-
Autos-scannen-private-Funknetze-Update-984118.html)

Google promised to delete the captured WiFi data but failed to do so:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432518/Google-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432518/Google-
we-failed-to-delete-all-Streetview-data.html) , official letter:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432552/Google-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9432552/Google-
Streetview-data-letter-in-full.html)

~~~
andyjohnson0
I have a hard time believing that Google deliberately set out to capture wifi
payloads. Apart from the obvious illegality, what use would they possibly have
for such data? Google already knows an immense amount of detail about its
users.

They screwed up (twice, if you count failing to delete the data) and thats a
serious matter. But deliberately wardriving _entire countries_? Hard to
believe.

~~~
mattzito
I think there's a middle ground here - first off, is it that obviously
illegal? Is there an expectation of privacy, similar to eavesdropping on a
conversation at the table next to you?

I think it is _now_ , but if we go back to 2007/2008, it might not have been.

And it might not even have been malicious - the Google engineers doing it
might have said, "Hey look, if x amount of wifi data is good, X amount has got
to be even better!". After all, they're data junkies, and might have decided
to capture chunks of data wholesale with the best intentions (and maybe not
even any clear ideas of how to use it).

I'm not trying to justify their actions, just trying to posit a scenario where
Google did intentionally capture wifi payloads without requiring that they had
a malicious purpose to do so.

------
greeneggs
I hate to be a critic, but to me the remarkable thing with Google's Street
View is how stagnant the interface has been. They have collected so much data,
but using it is still so painful, really a last resort. It is impossibly slow
to explore an area. Heaven forbid you click on the wrong side of an
intersection and have to click a half dozen times to cross the street. There
has to be a better way.

I am not sure how much they have rolled out, but Microsoft has been much more
innovative in presenting Street-View-style imagery, e.g., using linear
panoramas along a street instead of a series of spherical panoramas.

~~~
rasz_pl
This. Google has so much data at this point they should be actively converting
it all to pure 3D (structure from motion etc). With tango on the horizon there
will be a point in time phone could know where its at by simply comparing
geometry, or at the very least augment camera view with accurate directions
based on the scene geometry, and not crude 'somewhere this way'
gps+magnetometer Arrow. They could also use this data to augment self driving
cars, so its a no-brainer.

Google Earth is PATHETIC right now, sparse hand made badly textured blocky
models of few selected buildings in a capital of European country? Really
Google?

I sure hope they have a group inside google working on this already.

------
chime
What was the difficulty in making the camera unit watertight? I'm guessing a
simple solution like transparent globe would cause reflection problems but why
couldn't each camera be housed in a rubber-tight casing? The lens could be
made waterproof by design and everything else would be in a sealed rubber
glove. I'm not implying that the guys who mapped the entire world in 3D
couldn't figure out how to waterproof cameras. I'm asking what the core
engineering problem was in attempting to waterproof these cameras.

~~~
jzwinck
First you need the thing to be optically clear. Then you need it to be
watertight even with 100 MPH winds blowing on it. And once that's done, you'll
find water inside anyway. Condensation can easily form in a closed container
which moves at varying speeds through varying temperatures and has water
cooling it suddenly sometimes. You may even end up needing a heater inside the
thing before you've got it perfect.

------
ProAm
Anyone have a mirror, it looks like Google was not happy about this being
discusssed:

> _Down until I 'm done talking to Google about this post. _

~~~
Fuzzwah
Awesomely, google have a copy of it:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:436bNO2...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:436bNO2sB2IJ:ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com/2014/07/early-
days-on-street-view.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
pndmnm
Wow, I didn't realize that Amazon Blockview (part of A9 at the time) was so
short-lived. I used it all the time in Seattle when it was running.

------
hooplarbazaar
Why didn't the team just bolt together off-the-shelf DSLRs for this?

It seems like a lot of the low level problems were already solved by
commercial camera makers many years before.

Even today with the R7, why not just bolt together Gopros and manually set the
Aperture, ISO and shutter speed. You'd get better quality images, waterproof
cameras and they'd be significantly cheaper.

It's a shame to see a talented engineer distort the truth about Wifi packet
collection, especially after Google were shown to have acted deliberatly
(rather than "a single wrong line in the configuration file") source:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/google-knew-camera-car-software-could-capture-online-
data-7792533.html)

~~~
dsl
The beginning of the article mentions using off the shelf parts, with terrible
results. I'm sure if it was that easy and they got decent results from it,
they would not have expended so many resources custom building stuff.

------
npeihl
I'd be interested in an open source solution for displaying our own
streetview-type imagery. The county I live in is quite rural so Google hasn't
yet driven our streets. In 2011 the County's public works department paid a
consultant to drive the public roads in a streetview-type car. The county has
all collected imagery and point clouds, but only outdated software to view it
in. I've hacked together a proof-of-concept that loads the panoramic images
into a web browser (using three.js) to pan around and zoom. But I haven't
figured out how to overlay the road centerlines yet to be more Google-like.

------
isomorphic
> "I went on to develop aerial cameras for Google, but that story will have to
> wait for Google to publish some details."

I'm wondering what, if anything, that statement has to do with the Skybox
acquisition, or if the two are previously-unrelated parts of an overarching
aerial imaging plan.

Google is so far ahead of others in mapping it is downright scary.

I read somewhere speculation that Apple's iBeacon could be used to create
precise indoor maps of public or semi-public spaces. But then I read about
Project Tango, and wonder...

~~~
wmf
I suspect those aerial cameras are for airplanes; it's been known for a while
that Google Maps doesn't just use satellites.

~~~
gonzo
Or balloons.

------
strebler
Ahh yes, the ladybug, we had a few of those back in 2005-6. One of my
colleagues strapped one to the top of a car with a GPS and drove around
downtown. We wrote a java applet (and eventually had a flash version) to
navigate the capture sequences, eventually integrated with Google Maps.
Someone also strapped it to a robot and did our school's campus (or at least
as far as the battery would go). Good times.

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bambax
Great story of a fantastic project; Street View is still the main difference
between Google Maps and other alternatives (Bing has "Streetside" but with a
much smaller coverage; and AFAIK OSM / Mapbox have nothing).

What an excitement it must have been to work on such a project! Thanks for
sharing.

~~~
7980656
> and AFAIK OSM [has] nothing

Some of us are working on fixing that.

------
smackfu
There are a few more comments by the author on Google+:
[https://plus.google.com/+StephenShankland/posts/GGQdgLPn8J5](https://plus.google.com/+StephenShankland/posts/GGQdgLPn8J5)

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teepo
The things they were doing with cameras reminded me how Android started out as
a camera project and not a smart phone. I wonder if there's any relation...

