Could easily seeing myself come back to this.
│
└── Dey well; Be well
(The commenters below are right. It is the Maps API, not compute, that I should worry about. Using the free tier, it would have taken the author years to download all tiles. I wish I had their budget!)
It's the Google Maps API costs that will sink your project if you can't get them waived as art:
https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/
Not sure how many panoramas there are in New York or your metro, but if it's over the free tier you're talking thousands of dollars.
OCR I'd expect to be comparatively cheap, if you weren't in a hurry - a consumer GPU running PaddlePaddle server can do about 4 MP per second. If you spent a few grand on hardware that might work out to 3-6 months of processing, depending on the resolution per pano and size of your model.
> "media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can access these Street View images; you don’t even need a Google account!)."
Maybe they used multiple IPs / devices and didn't want to mention doing something technically naughty to get around Google's free limits, or maybe they somehow didn't hit a limit doing it as a single user? Either way, it doesn't sound like they had to pay if they only mention not needing an account.
(Or maybe they just thought people didn't need to know that they had to pay, and that readers would just want the free access to look up a few images, rather than a whole city's worth?)
I'm wondering about more the data - did they use Google's API or work with Google to use the data?
I believe it's a combo of SLAM/photogrammery/VIO but you don't have an IMU so that part would have to be estimated from the video. Maybe the flickering of the lights with the frames probably too fast.
ex. https://youtu.be/ohlzQNCpT7M?si=zH764fDlHqPKyjin&t=537 ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZi2GeEGdvM
If someone were to do what you're saying, it would be a huge win for people visiting and being able to find these places. I would love to see this.
edit: although this is not what you're describing, this is literally using a 360 camera
Apple's Room Plan is pretty legit measuring walls/objects in a room but also requires being in the room/moving it around
All Text in NYC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367029 - Dec 2024 (4 comments)
All text in Brooklyn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 - Aug 2024 (50 comments)
IIRC he found a way to download streetview images without paying, and used the OCR built-in to macOS (which is really good).
With current-gen multimodal LLMs, you could very easily query and plot things like "broken windows," "houses with front-yard fences," "double-parked cars," "faded lane markers," etc. that are difficult to generally derive from other sources.
For any reasonably-sized area, I'd guess the largest bottleneck is actually the Maps API cost vs the LLM inference. And ideally we'd have better GIS products for doing this sort of analysis smoothly.
"Surgery of the Fool" is my personal favorite.
"Fart bird special" is pretty funny, and "staff farting only" might be my favorite. Other good ones: "BECAUSE THE FART NEEDS," "Juice Fart," "WHOLESALE FARTS"
Instead shows me thousands of “Rev“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAMO
But difficult to figure out if any of them are original.
I liked this one, but it is most likely newer. It is on top of the City-as-school building where Basquiat attended, so it is probably a tribute.
https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/DZz7Gp1PtROe78ailUpvlA?o=11...
https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/z0SOvmU-5_yuspnsFvjVuA?o=16...
A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.
As seen on the sign of a liquor store near where I used to live. More info revealed https://lostnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-mystery-of-...
BNE is an anonymous graffiti artist known for stickers that read "BNE" or "BNE was here". The artist has left their mark in countries throughout the world, including the United States, Canada, Asia, Romania, Australia, Europe, and South America. "His accent and knowledge of local artists suggest he is from New York."
Also - a huge difference between UES and UWS, with more sushi spots on UES. Maybe its denser?
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.785843,-73.95097,3a,20y,56.6...
https://www.alltext.nyc/map?q=google&sm=e&m_lat=40.7532&m_lo...
EDIT: Lol, "communism" leads to 39 pages of Shen Yun billboards.
My only suggestion would be to remove duplicates. Many of the items are just the same thing from different angles. Of course, this is a tough technical challenge to solve that most likely cannot rely on location alone.
Again, a complex problem and I love it...
edit: I found mentions of Gaza bombings and there's cars with like #gaza on it so my guess is sometime in the last 2 years.
I could of course look it up but this is a game now for me, like when I found a hella old atlas in a library and tried to figure out the date it was published just by looking at the maps.
Enviable idea.
A service you can pay for of that simplicity probably doesn’t exist because there are other tools that integrate better with how the blind interact with computers, I doubt it’s copy and pasting text, and those tools are likely more robust albeit expensive
