Google impressed a lot of people when it debuted its Grand Canyon Street View imagery in October. The Trekker backpack used to capture that imagery, which is essentially a backpack-mounted version of the same all-seeing eye that sits atop the Google Street View car.

The roughly 40-pound backpack is not all that uncomfortable to wear, I found out when I slipped the Trekker on. It’s a little top-heavy, and I’m not sure I’d want to risk running at a brisk clip if I was using one out in the wild, but it’s really no heavier than a standard backpacker’s kit for a few days’ journey.

Silverman explained how the Trekker works, including how its camera sensor head gathers images and how those are then stored on a hefty solid state hard drive built into the backpack, where they can later be transferred back to Google’s servers to get started with the process of recreating a hike.

I asked Silverman whether we might see the Trekker make its way to the backs of other beings beyond humans, and he said that they are indeed mulling the idea of strapping versions of it to beasts of burden to help them continue to map the world in images. There are also plans in the works to mount it to remotely operated robots and small vehicles to help get imagery that otherwise wouldn’t be easily reachable by a human Trekker.

He said to expect plenty more to come from the Trekker team in terms of Street View imagery of some of the world’s most interesting – and most remote – locales. Combined with Google’s new underwater street view project, that means everyone can probably get a lot more familiar with a lot more of the world in the near future.

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Google’s underwater Street View launched last September, but Google’s Ocean program actually began six years ago, when one of the founders of Keyhole (which, after being acquired by Google, later became Google Earth), was inspired to also look into mapping the ocean. For several years now Google has been mapping the oceans, but bringing Street View underwater is still very challenging.

“Our goal is to really make all of our maps data more comprehensive by adding more ocean data. We want to take you from your home to the turtle’s home,” Google’s Jennifer Austin Foulkes said. So far, Google has launched this for six locations, including Oahu, Maui and locations around the Great Barrier Reef.

Because there is a strong scientific component to this project, the team set up a strict protocol for taking this imagery. Richard Vevers, director of the Catlin Seaview Survey – Google’s partner in this project – said that the cameras his team uses for this project are very different from those used by Google’s other Street View vehicles. The team had to use wider-angle lenses, for example. Google’s underwater Street View camera has three cameras on its front and takes images every three seconds. One of the cameras points downward, because that’s how images during reef surveys have traditionally been taken. The back of the scooter features a tablet that can control the cameras.

During a typical dive, the divers cover about 2km and take 3,000 to 4,000 images per camera, and the team does three dives per day, each of which lasts about an hour. In total, the team has taken about 150,000 images so far, and Vevers expects this number to grow exponentially over the next few months. In the long run, the team hopes to create diver-less systems that can stay underwater for 12 hours or more. The technology is already available, but it needs to be adapted to the kind of camera system needed for Street View.

In addition to the usual cameras, the team is also testing stereo cameras to create 3D imagery and has recently experimented with doing underwater Hangouts and using Photo Spheres to engage the public.

Every camera system costs about $50,000, and four of them are currently in existence, though two of them haven’t been in the water yet.

To get this underwater data into Street View, Vevers used Google’s standard Business Photos tool. The actual location of the images, by the way, is triangulated. The images, it’s worth noting, are also freely available for scientists.

The team is focusing on the Americas right now, but plans to bring underwater Street View to all of the world’s oceans over the next three years (that’s obviously just a few locations – not all of the oceans…). Another focus for the team is getting more developers involved – both for crowdsourcing data and for developing better reef-recognition algorithms. The existing algorithms can only interpret images from a downward-facing camera, but the team is hoping to create tools for working with all of the data the cameras generate.

Given the threats to the ocean, there is obviously a serious side to this project, something Vevers noted during his talk. Street View, he argues, is an important tool to inform the public about the threats that the ocean’s face today. “People don’t want to protect anything they can’t see,” he said. Most people don’t dive, but there’s no reason why we can’t take them diving virtually. There is no point in doing science, Vevers argues, if it doesn’t get out to the public and policy makers.

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Google Street View is maybe one of the most interesting and under appreciated technical developments of the past decade, but it’s all a little static when viewed through standard channels like Google Maps on the desktop or on a mobile device. A new project from Toronto UX design firm Teehan+Lax, which operates a Labs unit to explore its more playful side, threads together Street View imagery to create time-lapse animations called Hyperlapses, which makes Street View a more immersive experience.

You can choose from one of the pre-defined routes set up by Teehan+Lax, like a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge or a dusty drive in the Australian outback, or you can simply search for a location, set point A and point B, as well as a focal point, and generate your own street view. Impressive scenery and architecture makes for a more interesting Hyperlapse, but even one I created of just the few blocks before and after my front door was enthralling enough in a short loop.

The project is little more than an interesting tech demo at this point, without much in the way of actual use value, but Teehan+Lax have made the source code freely available to all on github. The tool also works best in Chrome, and will get your fan running since it has some steep processor requirements. On a day when The Postal Service’s 10th Anniversary Edition is out, however, it’s maybe the perfect time-waster, since that album makes a pretty near perfect soundtrack for virtually any Street View Hyperlapse.

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A couple of new Apple patent applications published today (via AppleInsider) show how the company might be thinking about competing with recent innovations from other big tech companies with similar, but different designs. The first is a filing that describes a convertible MacBook design, with a touch-sensitive screen that separates from the base. The second is a method for navigating a Street View-style view of virtual maps, complete with a twist that allows it to go inside buildings, too.

The first design for a convertible MacBook may look familiar, since it actually resembles a lot of designs available from Windows device makers, and some previous Android tablet designs. The screen detaches from the keyboard and body portion, which isn’t in itself terribly unique, but the screen in Apple’s version communicates with the brains in the base via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless communication protocols, meaning all the serious computing work is still handled by the traditionally located GPU and CPU. The screen itself is touch-sensitive, but doesn’t act as a standalone tablet in quite the same way it does in some new Windows device designs.

The screen also can charge wirelessly via the same kind of tech used in induction charging, drawing power from the base. What Apple describes here isn’t so much a convertible tablet, but more of a MacBook with a screen that solves the clumsy issue of how to use touch effectively on a notebook by allowing it to temporarily come off the base for more ergonomic touch-based interaction. Apple has talked about how touch doesn’t work on a traditional computer form factor in the past; this is one way around that.

Another patent application published today could give a clue as to where Apple is headed with Maps. It describes a navigation method for a Street View-style look at the world from the perspective of someone walking the streets themselves. The difference between Apple’s patent and existing Google Street View navigation is that Apple’s is motion controlled, treating the environment as a panorama, which can be navigated based on motion detection from onboard device sensors to let a user truly experience a virtual “walk” through the streets of a city.

There’s been little evidence to suggest Apple is deploying tech to gather its own Street View-style imagery for Apple Maps thus far, but another recent development at least makes sense given the context of this patent. Apple recently acquired indoor mapping company WiFiSlam, and this patent also describes making use of the system to map and navigated indoor environments, too, so that users could go “inside” select buildings. It was originally filed in September of 2011.

Both these patent applications seem more like Apple hedging its bets than reflections of any immediate upcoming products, based on recent reports. But they also address issues that could become or are already competitive sore spots for the company, so there’s still a decent chance we may eventually see them make their way to shipping products.

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As Forbes first reported this afternoon, Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, has decided to step down from her current position. Google has now confirmed this.

Whitten joined Google 10 years ago and oversaw the company’s privacy policies during a tumultuous time when its Street View cars were accused of spying on people’s Wi-Fi networks and Google decided to consolidate its over 70 privacy policies under a single document.

Whitten has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, where her thesis looked into “Making Security Usable.” She spent seven years as an engineer at the company before she was promoted to director of privacy right after the Wi-Fi Street View story broke and Google had been severely criticized for the privacy controls of Buzz, its pre-Google+ attempt at launching a social network.

At the time, Google described her as “an internationally recognized expert in the computer science field of privacy and security. She has been our engineering lead on privacy for the last two years, and we will significantly increase the number of engineers and product managers working with her in this new role.”

Whitten, Forbes reports, will be replaced by Lawrence You, a Google engineer who previously worked at Pixo, Apple and Taligent. Forbes reports Whitten will remain at the company to oversee the transition.

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Two years after the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Google has made available Street View images of Namie-machi in the Fukushima exclusion zone. The area encompasses Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Plant, which after the disaster was the scene of the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The 360-degree panoramic imagery, showing ruined buildings on empty streets, is both eerie and heartbreaking.

Namie-machi has been empty since its 21,000 residents were evacuated on March 11, 2011, the day of the earthquake. Google began photographing the area earlier this month after an invitation from Namie-machi’s mayor Tamotsu Baba. The imagery is part of Google’s digital archive project Memories for the Future.

“Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected surrounding communities, said Mayor Baba in an entry on Google Japan’s blog.

“Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering. But in Namie-­machi time stands still,” he added. “With the lingering nuclear hazard, we have only been able to do cursory work for two whole years. We would greatly appreciate it if you viewed this Street View imagery to understand the current state of Namie-­machi and the tremendous gravity of the situation.”

Other areas impacted by the tsunami that have been photographed as part of the initiative include Rikuzentakata in northeastern Japan. Google started capturing images of tsunami and earthquake damage a few months after the disaster. The project seeks to be a testament to the scale of the tsunami as different areas are gradually rehabiliated. In addition, Google’s post-earthquake intitiatives in Japan, where Yahoo! Japan is still the top search engine, have the company gain a more positive profile after several cultural missteps, including earlier negative public reaction to Street View in the privacy-conscious country.

Earlier this month, Google also launched Public Alerts in Japan, after the emergency response platform first made its debut in the U.S. Earthquake and tsunami warnings for Japan appear on Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Now when users search for information during a crisis.

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We know that Google’s Street View team has been making its technology smaller and more mobile, especially when it comes to people snapping images for Google Maps. Today, the team has shared some imagery from Canada’s Arctic territory of Nunavut.

The difference is that unlike with the Grand Canyon, the person carrying the Trekker on their back wasn’t a Google employee. It was a resident of Nunavut, Chris Kalluk, who works at a nonprofit organization called Nunavut Tunngavik, which is working along with Google to collect imagery and build more detailed maps of the Canadian Arctic.

Much like the Street View team did for its snowmobile mission during the Olympics, the Trekker has been prepped to handle below freezing temperatures, which are the conditions in Canada’s Arctic about eight months of the year, Kalluk explains in the post: “Winter up here is a way of life. And the only way to truly understand it is to see it for yourself.”

Here’s what Kalluk had to share about his experience, the first Trekker expedition in Canada:

I’m wearing the backpack to collect Street View imagery as I walk to the shore of Frobisher Bay, where the wind is the strongest and you can see the tide piling up mountains of sea ice. On the way I’ll pass sled dogs tied up outside houses, yapping in anticipation of their next trip. And I may stop to check out an igloo, built by Inuit craftsmen using methods passed down over a millennia.

As part of its commitment to build a comprehensive and accurate map of Canada’s north, Google visited my home, Cambridge Bay, last August and published imagery of the trip that fall. But this visit to Iqaluit marks the first time the Google Maps team has ventured into an Arctic climate during the winter months, where average temperatures can dip below -30°C [-25°F].

Kalluk and Project Lead at Google Maps, Raleigh Seamster, aren’t just snapping photos with a backpack. The pair spent time with members of the community to discuss how Google Maps would like to collect all of the information about Iqaluit. He says that they spent time with locals explaining Map Maker, the tool where citizens can participate in the creation and updating of Google Maps.

Google is trying to get imagery and information out of every nook and cranny of the globe, and you can imagine a day where we’ll all be able to set out to our favorite spots that haven’t been documented yet, and feed that information back to a global database. In essence, with the tools that Google Street View and Maps have created, we’re all Christopher Columbus, re-exploring and documenting what people have only visited and snapped photos of for themselves and friends for years.

Here’s how Kalluk explained the mission in the Arctic zones: “I like to think of it as our chance to give you the lead sled dog’s view.” In case you never visit Nunavut, Street View is your way of beaming there and visiting. The imagery isn’t available yet, but if the 9,500 Grand Canyon shots are any indication, it’s going to be pretty amazing.

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Google has been doing a lot to make Google Maps more about exploring the world, including places few will ever be able to see with their own eyes. Today, the company announced that it has added more locations to Maps, including Street View-style access to some of the highest peaks in the world.

Via the official Google Blog, the company revealed the introduction of new Street View features for some of Earth’s most celebrated mountains, including Everest, Mount Elbrus, Aconcagua and Kilimanjaro. They belong to the famous Seven Summits, an elite collection of the highest mountains on each continent. You don’t even have to acclimatize to high altitudes to check out these locations on Google Maps.

There’s a lot of detail in the virtual tours you can take of these peaks, including images of base camps set up by actual explorers. Google set out with a fisheye lens and lightweight tripod to capture the images, and will be detailing the whole expedition in a Google+ Hangout which is set to kick off at 10 AM PT today.

Google has been doing a lot to build out some amazing views of the more remote corners of the world, including its recent introduction of Street View tours of the Grand Canyon, Antarctica and other far-flung locations. Google’s remote tourism is actually an incredibly cool way to attract eyeballs to the Maps product, while helping the company build out an even more comprehensive database than it already has.

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A while ago, Google took its Street View cameras to the slopes and started documenting ski runs at a few select resorts. Today, Google is expanding its mapping options for skiers by adding 38 new run and lifts maps to Google Maps, including its apps for Android and iPhone. These include well-known ski resorts like Squaw Valley, Big Sky and Whistler Blackcomb.

Ski runs are marked on Google maps with the usual blue, green and black lines to mark the difficulty of the terrain. Ski lifts are marked as red dotted lines.

Google first started adding ski runs and resorts to its maps in November 2012. At that point, it added about 90 ski and snow resorts around the world to its maps. Those initial locations included mountains in Europe, Canada and the U.S. Today’s update mostly focused on the U.S., with a few Canadian mountains like Whistler Blackcomb and Panorama Mountain thrown in for good measure.

Google says it has “more ski resort maps on the way,” though with the winter slowly coming to an end, I assume we won’t see too many of these updates until later this year.

You can find a full list of all the new ski runs in Google’s blog post.

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When Google announced a new project it called Trekker last October, it sounded like a far-reaching and futuristic 20% type undertaking. Today, that project has come through with some of the most detailed and amazing interactive imagery of the Grand Canyon, as promised, showing off Google’s vision for how the world can be catalogued and detailed for everyone’s daily tasks and travels.

Starting today, these images will start showing up on Google Maps for everyone to check out. In a blog post from Google Maps Project Manager, Ryan Falor, he discussed exactly how these images were taken and where these images will be applied:

This breathtaking imagery collection was made possible with the Trekker. Our team strapped on the Android-operated 40-pound backpacks carrying the 15-lens camera system and wound along the rocky terrain on foot, enduring temperature swings and a few muscle cramps along the way. Together, more than 9,500 panoramas of this masterpiece of nature are now available on Google Maps.

Take a quick look at some of the amazingly detailed photos that the Trekker backpack captured:

Sure, 40 pounds might sound really heavy, but when you’re out trekking through nature, carrying heavy objects isn’t something totally new. The idea of Trekker is that there are so many views and vantage points that you can’t capture simply by driving a Street View vehicle up and down roads. There are places that cars and trucks can’t go, and this is where Trekker comes into play.

Up until now, here’s the type of image you could expect when poking around the Grand Canyon on Google Maps:

Yep, it’s the street. Not so pretty. Check these out, though:

You’ll now be able to see more, explore more and plan more, all before you leave for your big trip. It started with the Grand Canyon and there’s no telling what location will be “trekked” next by Google.

While Trekker isn’t a consumer device, it does look like Google will be sending these things out into the wild to get more data like the shots you’ll see in the below video:

I discussed the possibility of Street View technology becoming available for Google Glass at Trekker’s launch and was told “Absolutely.” As you can tell, Google wants people to feel like they’re Christopher Columbus, exploring areas in ways that nobody else ever has, while documenting their experiences along the way. There could be a nice cozy spot at the Grand Canyon that only you know about, and you could be the first person to take an image of it for Google Maps with something like Trekker or Glass. That’s pretty neat, and still seems futurustic.

Pretty soon, every nook and cranny on the planet will have corresponding images and panoramic views. The world continues to feel smaller, and less scary, thanks to technology like this.

Not only does mapping help us find our way around, it also saves us money and creates new jobs, according to Google. VP of Google Geo, Brian McClendon, says that geo services saves 1.1B hours of travel time each year and pays out $90B in wages. It’s big business with major impact on all of us:

Google Maps is front and center for all of this.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch