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0 pointsmatsemann2y ago0 comments

I'm contributing bicycle trails to Google Street View (and CC-BY-SA to Mapillary). It's no longer done through the app, but through uploading a equirectangular videofile with either gps metadata or attaching a gpx file here: https://streetviewstudio.maps.google.com/

So no 3rd party services needed for plain old Street View. It's a bit opaque what's going on when you upload a video, though, they do all kinds of weird stuff with it. Try to align the track to a nearby road, when I'm not biking that road. Selecting intervals of pictures that doesn't make sense compared to how I would do manually etc. This one could perhaps control better through the API and uploading photo by photo and connect them.

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plorg2y ago· 2 in thread

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of camera/setup do you use? How do you find the results? I have been experimenting with this but the equipment I've been using (a mediocre 4k360 camera) gives pretty bad results, and I'm wary of spending a bunch of money and still getting images I'm not satisfied with. I have a bunch of my own street view contributions that were fun to make, but they look nice because they were taken with my phone and I had good control of the process.

matsemannOP2y ago

A Gopro MAX on a pole on top of my bike helmet. The results raw are pretty OK when I view it locally. It's 5.6k. The problem is often whatever Google decides to do on their end with the video can be a bit funky. So you wont see the same quality as when uploading a photo sphere, but I can cover 40+ km in a ride, which I would never be able to do if I were to manually capture each spot with manual control.

plorg2y ago

Cool. I've been looking to record a bunch of gravel around where I live (and a bunch of minimum maintenance roads) in addition to the relatively minimal bike-specific infrastructure.

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