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A comment on The Pancake: A Less Annoying Way To Move Through Google Street View. Parent comment

Re:The Pancake: A Less Annoying Way To Move Through Google S... by tlrobinson on Thursday June 04, 2009 @04:34PM (#642156)
I wondered what they were going to do with the LIDAR sensors on the Street View vehicles.

Maybe they didn't even know what they would do with it, but decided it was better to throw LIDAR in from the beginning and figure out what to do with it later, rather than having to drive every street in the world twice.

(Or maybe they used that data for the 3D models of buildings in Google Maps and Google Earth?)

Anyone know if the cars have any other sensors that haven't been utilized yet? I'm guessing they also recorded WiFi and possibly cell tower locations for geolocation.

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Re:The Pancake: A Less Annoying Way To Move Through Google S... by lallysingh on Thursday June 04, 2009 @04:45PM (#642176)
Huh, I assumed it was just fairly-smart geometry estimation. How else could they compensate for the LIDAR hitting cars & people?
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Re:The Pancake: A Less Annoying Way To Move Through Google S... by calambrac on Thursday June 04, 2009 @04:57PM (#642207)
They've made multiple passes by now, you would assume there aren't always going to be cars or people in the way. There could easily be some data scrubbing smarts in there, too, like knowing that a 3 story building doesn't suddenly jut out to the road in its lowest six feet (notice, for instance, in Brooklyn, the stoops aren't considered part of the building surface).
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