You’re all familiar with Google Street View and the camera-topped Google Car – but what about all of the interesting places inaccessible to cars?
Enter the Google Trike, which started as a project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team:
“I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world – ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts – aren’t accessible by car,” says Dan. “When I’m riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it’s off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can’t wait to see what our users come up with.”
Google’s Street View trike lets us take pictures of places that are not accessible by car.
There’s an interesting debate developing about how we manage our digital self. With the increase in social sites; think Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Last.FM, Delicious, etc… your social map is probably growing faster than you think.
It raises interesting questions about privacy and who owns your data. Do you really want all your data aggregated by third parties, or do you prefer a centralised self.
Google can now tap into information broadcast from mobile towers to approximate your devices current location on the map. “It’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close..” Google explains on its website. I’ve installed this and tried it in New York. It’s amazingly accurate, and on my N95 you can activate true GPS too. Very cool.
