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 :)
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.
Well, if you have a look at some examples that @stalker@lemmy.ml posted in a comment here, you can see that’s not impossible and that somebody is already doing it.
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…
any sane people would same the same about a map covering the whole world, and yet there is openstreetmap.
No sorry, that’s a completely different amount of data. Look at how large (or rather, how comparatively tiny) the OSM data set is. Now see how much photo data you’d get for that amount.
you have a point there.
and yet we have the internet archive… so it seems to be possible.
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.
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.
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
I’m sure doing that wouldn’t lead to insanity
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.
