The Google Maps Street View team has been mapping the roadways of this earth for about a decade, but they’re now looking at mapping the wilderness.
Street View Trekker is one of Google’s newest mapping projects. It’s goal: map and photograph wilderness sites that can’t be explored on wheels.
“There’s a whole wilderness out there that is only accessible by foot,” according to the Google Blog announcement. “Trekker solves that problem by enabling us to photograph beautiful places such as the Grand Canyon so anyone can explore them.”
The trekker will start mapping hiking paths, bike lanes, trekking routes–anything, basically, that’s off the beaten track. It’s a backpack-like device that people wear as they go trekking about. It has a large orb that extends up above the head and contains a camera alongside geolocational gizmos for recording and feeding info back to Google Maps.
While there is no information about whether Google’s device will be available publicly, a German company called Streetview Technology offers a DIY Street Trekker kit, according to Digital Trends. The kit records the information and the images, stitching them together. Users can then upload the images and data to Google’s custom Street View player.
Catch a video of The Street View Trekker here.
Image via Google Blog.
