Finally a Worthy Competitor to Google Street View

Posted by gyllen on Thursday July 30, 2015 @03:56PM
from the blog.mapillary.com dept.

http://blog.mapillary.com/news/2015/07/30/viewing-experience.html

( 6 comments | 23 points | on HN )

Re:Finally a Worthy Competitor to Google Street View by hermanmerman on Thursday July 30, 2015 @04:15PM (#9977706)

As cool as it is, the reality is that geography changes: cities evolve, roads are built, closed, etc. Maintaining an up-to-date database of those views can only be done to serve another, very lucrative purpose, the one of which only Google & al. can offer. I don't think a community-based approach can work when the scale of effort is this high.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Finally a Worthy Competitor to Google Street View by gyllen on Thursday July 30, 2015 @06:49PM (#9978771)

Im not to sure about that. Number of pictures are growing exponentially (28 million an counting) and soon there are more active weekly users than there are google street view cars. The whole point with crowdsourcing is that streets changes.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Mapillary

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Re:Finally a Worthy Competitor to Google Street View by hermanmerman on Thursday July 30, 2015 @08:00PM (#9979089)

It's one of those situations where I would be very happy to be wrong :)

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Re:Finally a Worthy Competitor to Google Street View by abienvenu on Friday July 31, 2015 @02:25AM (#9980229)

The best world map - OpenStreetMap - and the best encyclopedia - Wikipedia - already prove you wrong :)

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Re:Finally a Worthy Competitor to Google Street View by julien_c on Thursday July 30, 2015 @04:21PM (#9977747)

This is really interesting, but I'll second the intuition that building a critical mass for StreetView-like data is probably one of the hardest thing to crowdsource.

It's just not fun to be driving each and every road around where you live. Besides, without an hemispheric camera data is really limited.

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Re:Finally a Worthy Competitor to Google Street View by just_testing on Thursday July 30, 2015 @05:40PM (#9978374)

Actually, building a critical mass of streetView-like data can happen while having other goals in mind.

For example, I live in São Paulo and I'm a member of OpenStreetMap. Every time I ride in a bike lane, I take photos of it with mapillary, so it gets way easier to map them.

By the way, the OSM coverage of bike lanes in São Paulo, because of the help of mapillary, is the best one in all maps available (even the city hall ones)

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