I was wondering why there isn’t or if there is, an Open Source (Free, or not) Street View like Google Maps. I like geography as a hobby, like my other hobbies, and found GeoHub which sparked my interest in being a free geoguessr alternative. I just don’t understand why Google is the only Mapping service people go to, is Google the only one that has street view? is this a hard business model to achieve?
Please, I’d love too know :)
- stalker ( @stalker@lemmy.ml ) 43•2 months ago
Actually, there is. There is mapillary (bought by Meta at some point) and KartaView (I don’t think it is that popular). Code is not free, but licence for images is permissive. My personal favorite is Panoramax - completely open source, open licence and even federated!, but it is still in early stages, but keep an eye on it, looks promising. As always, problem with these efforts is not source code, but rather data.
- Estebiu ( @Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 5•2 months ago
Damn, panoramax is impressive. They already have the street where I live!
- delirious_owl ( @delirious_owl@discuss.online ) 3•2 months ago
Yeah, if you use OsmAnd it shows you mapillary images in the app. You can click around the same as with Google, but the images are all open source.
Thus problem has already been solved :)
- ReversalHatchery ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months ago
KartaView went proprietary, and they were dishonest all the time. Look at their github issues with more comments. IIRC there were also bought out, by something that’s only popular in some country.
- unexposedhazard ( @unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ) 41•2 months ago
Gathering street view like data, processing it, running the service and keeping it up to date would require millions if not billions of dollars/euros in capturing equipment, server farms, wages, electricity, lawfirms.
If you want something thats compareable to the google service, its entirely impossible to do it with a project structure like osm has.
Even if someone had the funding to get started, they would most likely get bought out by google or apple or microsoft very quickly once they got comparable results.
- 7EP6vuI ( @7EP6vuI@feddit.org ) English7•2 months ago
any sane people would same the same about a map covering the whole world, and yet there is openstreetmap.
yes there are many challenges, but if you start small and grow from there it could work and maybe span a town or two in a couple of years…
- helenslunch ( @helenslunch@feddit.nl ) 1•2 months ago
Not necessarily. Strap a $300 camera to your roof, use a properly-written app, and start driving and uploading.
Not likely but also not necessarily cost-prohibitive.
- Björn Tantau ( @bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ) 30•2 months ago
Well, if you want to do it properly you’ll have to mount a 360° camera on a car and drive a car through every street of the whole world. Takes a while. And then you’ll have to obey the countries privacy laws and at least blur all faces and licence plates.
There are other mapping services that do it but Google were the first who got really popular and did it on a massive scale.
- illi ( @illi@lemm.ee ) English9•2 months ago
And once you are finished you can probably start over to stay up to date
- jeffreyosborne ( @jeffreyosborne@lemm.ee ) 3•2 months ago
Google doesn’t do that either, so we wouldn’t have to either. I could name a few places that use photos from 10+ years ago, which look drastically different from the present
- folkrav ( @folkrav@lemmy.ca ) 5•2 months ago
They definitely update the photos, just faster in some areas than others, visibly.
- illi ( @illi@lemm.ee ) English2•2 months ago
Depends on the place I guess. I’m pretty sure some are updated
- jeffreyosborne ( @jeffreyosborne@lemm.ee ) 2•2 months ago
Yeah they are
- smeeps ( @smeeps@lemmy.mtate.me.uk ) 1•2 months ago
Google absolutely update most roads every year or so. Busy roads multiple times a year. Even my cul de sac in a minor town has photos every 5 years
- Midnitte ( @Midnitte@beehaw.org ) English1•2 months ago
I’m sure doing that wouldn’t lead to insanity
- ltxrtquq ( @ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml ) English12•2 months ago
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Street-level_imagery_services#With_photosphere_support
I was also looking into this recently, and I think one of the limiting factors would be the storage and processing power you’d need to blur faces and license plates and then let everyone have access to millions of photos on demand.
- Elise ( @xilliah@beehaw.org ) 2•2 months ago
I have a pretty weak computer doing real time face detection, so I can’t imagine that being the problem. You could literally do it in real time while biking around.