Gadgetory

hey guys it's Casey with the bird so in 2007 Google started building Street View it's on the ground map of every street and trail that the company could get access to and last year Google introduced trekker a customized backpack that would let Google go places they could never get to before from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the top of Mount Fuji we wanted to know what it's like to actually make one of these maps so we came with a street view team to the Presidio in San Francisco where I got a try on the trekker and actually see what it's like to make Street View happen so the trekker is a mobile image capture platform we took some of the same technology from the Street View car with the camera and made it portable ultra portable before that if we wanted to go you know down some steep stay you know Hills up stairs I think we were only able to do me like maybe one of those I think we carried our 350 pound trike up the stairs at the High Line in New York just because that was a really cool location but there was no way we were gonna go to the bottom of the Grand Canyon or the top of Mount Fuji and so that is like the whole justification for the trekker is making it ultra portable and being able to go to places that we've never been able to go before people are used to the image quality that we have with Street View so we actually took this camera and it looks very much like the car because it's the same lenses it's the same sensors it's the same interface electronics and we had to figure out a way to get that off of a car onto someone's back so that was our biggest challenge so the trucker was again somebody's 20% project really garden team named Gary Ambler and and colleagues just decided that yes we should try to put you know our camera on a backpack because there were so many places we could go with either cars or tricycles and and that made sense again we we're always you know we're we're that more ideas and we have people to execute on them so it's not surprising that this story is a 20 percent all these are the way projects their genesis is somebody getting excited about something or trying to solve a problem and then getting that colleagues excited to work on it our process here is somebody will think of an idea so the trucker was a 20% project in 20% projects here are hey boss I'd like to think about this a little more and the answer is usually ok and it started growing and becoming developed our engineering team said ok we're going to build one and then when they got one working they said ok this is gonna work so to a place like the Presidio it starts with an idea this place would be cool to go on maps and so then we will reach out to the partner or partners will reach out to us through the there's a partner portal on the Street View site and they'll request that we come out or we request of them that hey wouldn't it be cool if we got together and made these imagery available to everyone 15 5 megapixel cameras with slight overlaps between all the imagery if you just take that and you plot that on your desk it looks like these distorted blobs with unique images the colors are off the exposures are all a bit off because the sensitivity is all a bit different so what we do is we will take those 15 images we'll blend the scenes will adjust will match the color will and match the exposures and then even beyond that we collect 75 megapixels wrong there's 65 megabits of unique pixels then we do the magic there to resample that imagery and serve it up so that it gets to your to your device in the way that's appropriate for your device it's it's really a phenomenal bit of work that goes on after we put these pixels onto a disk and the way I think about it now I mean the analogy I would give to people is that we you know Street View is like the physical equivalent to the Google crawler but we just sort of crawl the physical we're taking pictures and try to make sense of them try to make them useful there's so many amazing ones I mean I mean where do you start so the White House or the temple of the pyramid and Sun down into akan in Mexico five weeks going out doing ski resorts in the Colorado mountains of the Grand Canyon NASA Kennedy Space Center so there's me some really really Colin's of all we have data in 54 countries and that's time I checked and we of course we like to expand that I mean the world is very large so I think when we start the project we're very opportunistic we just went wherever we could right so now we're trying to do better planning and we we we tend to go first to places where there's more user interest but you know we we want to go everywhere we won't be comprehensive one thing that's of huge interest to us is all the your landmarks in the world where we there's a trust-fund tourists from around the world but but of course we're gonna go will be comprehensive so it's just a matter of time