Everyone’s very excited about the new Street View feature in Google Maps and the cool 3D view in Microsoft maps. And they both are indeed great…if you live in NYC or San Francisco or some other major metropolitan area where the Google van or the Microsoft aerial photography planes have cruised past. But the sad reality is that most of us aren’t so lucky (okay, as it happens I am—that’s my SF office building at right—but you get my point).
What about everyone else? I was reminded about this in reading the BoingBoing thread on this, where reader Andrew Iverson says:
I guess i’m in a small group, i wish they would cover more than just those cities, but i live in a very small town (River Falls, WI) that on google maps is in very bad resolution.
Good point. I suggest taking matters into your own hands.
Rather than wait for the Microsoft plane to darken your rooftop or the Google van to drive down your block, just build your own UAV and get high resolution aerial imagery of your own neighborhood (or anybody else’s) as often as you want. It’s the Long Tail of mapping!
And you thought my crazy summer project had nothing to do with the subject of this blog….
BTW, if you want to see the UAVs up close and working (well, at least on the ground), I’ll be presenting them this evening at IDEO’s Quickie fest in San Francisco.
