All right, who guessed 'street mapping' for those mystery Apple vans? Congratulations Apple has revealed that its weird camera-mounted vans, seen roaming the California, are being used to gather images for a street mapping app. The Cupertino giant wrote on its website that it will be taking vehicles mounted with cameras around Europe and the US to gather street-level snaps for Apple Maps for iOS and OS X – …
Don't forget that all those pictures have to be updated so they can keep track of where you park, whether you moved and to check your wifi. Someone has to keep track of which car and house goes with which wireless router and iPhone. I mean what if you moved to a nicer place, bought a new Mercedes or just visited a friend? How else would they know you had money you're not giving them?
Thanks for the warning
<evil grin>
Returns to laboratory to develop large animated autoinflatable maggot (with rounded corners) in time for photoshoot.
Thinks - Would I get crowd funding to mass produce these?
So - theyr'e going to blur out numbers and faces. What about all the other activities google are famous for capturing? Will it be possible to add info or images their maps? Can an apple pee on an android? Evil minds need to know etc.
1) It's not going live yet, they're collecting data.
2) The shows where they're going to be *this month* not *ever*. Beware of bad journalism.
Will they cover everywhere when they launch? Probably not, but then as someone who lives in an area that wasn't covered by Streetview for the first two or three years I would say that Streetview's initial coverage was not "good" when it launched.
Apple is an immensely warmist company making huge press about buying renewable energy etc etc etc. Heck they even have Al Gore on their board of directors.
Google does not seem much different with their head honchos all warmists.
Yet they all seem to be OK with driving two sets of vehicles all over the planet to gather duplicate data.
We'll leave aside the fact they all fly around in corporate jets (as well as a fighter jet).
How does anyone take them seriously?
I Hope that they extend the coverage and give an option to GOOGLE maps as they are Killing Classic view and the "NEW" Google maps is SH*T has missing features, has boxes all over the screen. does not zoom in as close as the old map (im house hunting so this helps before deciding to drive to another city to view a property I.R.L.) and loads more gripes about the new version. (I DONT LIKE IT)
until recently you could choose the old view but not any more. :-(
Not that Google will listen to its customers as its customers are really advertising multi nationals and we are just data pawns. but sign the petition to keep classic view on google maps https://www.change.org/p/tell-google-bring-back-classic-google-maps
Bing Maps is just not an option. the resolution is lower and its way out of date. the building i live in at the moment was built 6 years ago and its just a hole in the ground on Bing maps :-(
so some GOOD alternatives are needed.
Excellent, can we expect a new round of silliness when they capture pictures of Viking frogmen, everyone mooning and Americans that fit the stereotype!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
A decade ago I was employed (informally as a contractor) and issued a PDA with an accessory "black box" that had GPS & wireless capability which plugged into my car's power tap. The whole contraption, wired together as it was, sat on the car dashboard although the PDA itself was to be attached to the windscreen in typical smartphone fashion on a l-o-n-g flex-neck the likes of which I've never seen since. The PDA booted right into a wifi logging program that recorded GPS coordinates/MAC addresses/time & date of every passing access point - a precursor to what every smartphone does these days via tiny embedded chips...but with a much stronger external antenna. Unfortunately no GPS mapping available to Yours Truly the driver of the automobile, as all results were recorded directly into the PDA.
VERY unfortunate as I would simply receive an emailed territory map and be tasked with driving up and down every accessibly road within said territory. Not too bad in the countryside but in crowded areas I had to highlight (on my printed map) each roadway as traversed - all those Avenues A/B/C and dead-end side streets get confusing after a while. Had to drive for at least 30 hours weekly (at $15 an hour and pay for my own fuel) to remain on contract but could freely choose hours/days for the task. At the end of each day I would upload the day's records via a stop at the local Starbucks, about the only widespread free wifi outfit at the time at least here in the U.S.A. One particularly long 12-hour day (spent in a major city) there were upwards of 100,000 results uploaded...and this was back in 2004!!
I could stop at any time to take in the sights/food/whatever but also had to log such "timeouts" which were easily tracked by Skyhook. I even ended up annotating the maps with exceptional sightings as I drove up (and often back down) every single local street in an aimless fashion always worrying the authorities would notice and label my car as suspicious.
Best job I ever had! Despite the seeming tedium I found enjoyment in the variety of neighborhoods spied upon, fully satisfying some kind of wanderlust in the process. When I finally got a Real Job it was sort of sad to give it up. I had no idea but apparently Skyhook was providing this data to Apple for their (at the time) GPS-less mapping functions.
why did they have laser scanning units? the one I saw in San Jose had two oscillating mirror scanners as well as the multiple cameras and a hub connected sensor.
GPS and the cameras give all the necessary street view for maps. Scanners are for machine level recognition of relative positions. Hub mounted sensors for speed and distance travelled are best for dead reckoning navigation, which isn't very good when satellite positioning is available.
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