‘DIY streetview’ camera lets you be Google
The world is your oyster. — (Credit: Streetview Technology) — As Google takes Street View off-road with its new Trekker backpacks, German company Streetview Technology is taking the mapping technology in yet another new direction — DIY terrain.
Context & Ripple Effects
Street-level imagery has been a Google-controlled domain since Street View launched, and it has carried a privacy burden from early on — AP's 2007 piece on the 'ick' factor captured the unease that shaped how the product was policed. In April 2012 Google itself started leaning on user contributions, building landmark photo tours out of users' own uploaded images.
This story catches two moves happening in the same week: Google pushing its own capture gear into the field with the Trekker backpack for off-road terrain, while German startup Streetview Technology sells consumers a camera kit that makes them their own street-mapping operator. The pickup across Search Engine Watch, Cult of Mac, DVICE and Technabob shows the DIY-imagery idea traveling well beyond the CNET writeup.
First-order effects
- Consumers gain a way to capture street-level panoramic imagery without waiting for a Google car or Trekker pass through their area, turning Streetview Technology into a direct-to-user hardware seller in a market Google supplies only with its own fleet.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to formalize how outside imagery plugs into its maps — the April photo-tour feature already showed it consuming user photos, so a consumer capture device gives that intake channel an actual hardware ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If user-captured imagery becomes routine, street-level mapping shifts from a capital-intensive fleet operation to a crowdsourced supply chain — and reopens the privacy questions that dogged Street View in 2007, since capture decisions move out of one company's hands and into millions of cameras.
The trend: Street-level mapping is drifting from centrally operated camera fleets toward user-contributed imagery, with hardware makers racing to arm the crowd before platforms decide how to accept it.