This morning around 11:00AM my office went abuzz when Mike Cairns (chief geek) at ServicePoint said “hey Bill, look at that”, pointing out the window on the back of our building in Bedford, which is suburb of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Sure enough, driving slowly, then parking in a big empty parking lot it was the Google Street View car and driver.
I couldn’t resist. I just had to try and track this car down and get up close, not so much to be part of the imagery but just to satisfy my curiosity (and give me an excuse to write a blog entry!). So, I ran down 5 flights of stairs and jumped in my car and went live on the cell phone with Mike who was calling the play-by-play from the 5th floor to make sure if ‘he’ started moving again that I would have a bead on him. Sure enough, he leaves the parking lot and Mike loses sight of the car but not before seeing his last turn toward Dartmouth, but there are two Bedford neighborhoods between where he turned and the highway connecting Bedford to Burnside, Dartmouth. Hmmm. I first make sure he actually didn’t go to Dartmouth so I break the speed limit to catch up to him on the highway and confirm that he, in fact, didn’t go to Dartmouth. I come back to Bedford and prowl the two neighborhoods for 15 minutes without luck and finally give up and go back to the office depressed. I still think I missed him in either of the neighborhoods though…..and I was right. While taking off my coat begrudgingly and staring through the trees up into the Eaglewood subdivision, what do I spot but ‘the car’…again. Out the door I go again and race to Eaglewood Drive.
BINGO! Found him driving up Eaglewood Drive. I follow him with cell phone video camera running for a few minutes as he turns onto a side street and then he pulls over. Perfect. My chance to get up close to the “Google car”. Now, my next move might surprise you but get this….I asked the driver if he minded if I took a few pictures of him, the car and cameras!
Go figure. Google is capturing terabytes of imagery without asking permission (which I don’t believe they need) and I decide the polite thing to do is ask for permission to take some shots of the Google Street View car and driver!. Nuts I know. Turns out, the driver “Steve” had no problem with me taking pictures and even answering a few questions. I think I set him at ease by telling him I loved everything about Google and Street View.
I asked him if he was from Halifax and he said “yes”.
I asked how he got the job and he said “I got a call from a temp agency. They said they needed a driver and that if I wanted to do it I had to go to Toronto for training and to pick up the car” He drove the car from Toronto to Halifax.
I asked if he’s been followed or bothered by people and he said, “not too much, most people just stare but I’ve had the media following me for hours, and it can be distracting. I have to concentrate on what I am doing.”
Steve indicated that he has to “send the hard disks to Toronto” regularly. I can imagine there is a *lot* of data. I didn’t ask any questions about the technology on the roof of the car as I suspected that might be off limits and it was likely already reported online, which it was.
As has been reported, Google has been roaming the roads of major cities across Canada recently building its ‘street view’ database, who’s imagery will be soon incorporated into Google Maps. Once complete, the possibilities are near endless as to how this imagery can be used and most of the potential is positive.
Simply put, it will give the world the chance to virtually visit every street in every major centre across Canada. Since this blog is about ‘efficiency’ I don’t think it is a stretch to suggest that Street View can be a significant contributor to efficiency in many scenarios. Street View is essentially the geographic equivalent of video conferencing. It enables people to gain many of the benefits of presence without the need to physically be present. In fact, it makes some things possible that are practically impossible, unless you have “eyes in the back, sides, and top of your head”. The technology employed by Google to capture this imagery is pretty sophisticated stuff. There are 9 cameras, 8 giving 360 degree coverage and 1 pointing upward to capture the view that people would normally get if they were to look upwards in a downtown with larger buildings. There are also super-sensitive lasers attached to the camera stack which I understand enable 3 dimensional imaging of things like commercial streetscapes but also to remove people from the images! Yes, thats right. Google appears to have employed a laser scanning algorithm that automatically removes pedestrians from the pictures whenever possible. Lots of privacy advocates have been whining about being captured by the “Goog”, which, I guess, is the modern version of the “borg”.
The above closeup photo of the camera is courtesy of:
If they are putting Bedford on the map, they must be doing everywhere.