Openly Licensed Streetview with Panoramax

In case you wonder, Panoramax instances are 100 % French for now. Even if the OSM-FR instance can be used for photos outside of France, don't expect yet to see lots of international photos on it. It takes time to communicate and convince people it's a good idea.

In France though, a few months ago, there was not really more than one big french city (Strasbourg) captured in 360°.

Now, more than ten big cities have interesting coverage. Check out this link to see a map of all the 360° photos https://api.panoramax.xyz/#focus=map&map=7.33/47.583/0.742&p...

In fact, lots of municipalities already have 360° photos of their streets... sleeping on their servers.

Interesting fact : in France, public funded administrations must open their data, by law, exceptions aside.

Disclaimer : I'm not working on the Panoramax project, but plugged it on https://cartes.app/?choix+du+style=oui&rue=oui#6.67/47.493/2... (https://github.com/laem/cartes), the French open source alternative to Google Maps, which is in dire need of good quality 360° photos !

Perhaps relevant to this subject, there are now <$400 three-band GNSS compass receivers (e.g. two three band receivers in a single unit so you can run two antennas with a meter or two baseline and get accurate headings in addition to position), based on the Unicorecomm UM982 chipset. E.g. https://www.ardusimple.com/product/simplertk3b-compass/ (There are other vendors, but I've done business with this one before)

I mention it because for imaging, small heading errors have way more impact on where you're looking than small position errors but single antenna gps doesn't really give you headings except with assumptions from motion.

I've got one sitting in a box here, haven't tried it out yet but plan to soon...

At least in the instance I've used, my pictures end up published with a link to my personal OSM account, and with the full dump of Exif data coming from my camera (including bits that are irrelevant for this kind of picture). This has privacy implications. Caveat emptor.

The only coverage in the entire southeastern US is a gas station in Alabama. It's an interesting project but "openly licensed streetview" is overselling it by several football fields in any country.

It is good to see an alternative with a friendly license.

As storage gets cheaper I would like to see seasonal as well as night/day images for streetview photography.

So if i wanted to buy a good setup to contribute to this what should i buy? The faq andd doxumentation appear to be in french.

I tried offering the author of this to publish a huge dataset on it and he seemed oddly uninterested.

They should import data from Mapillary as I see the whole of South Africa is missing. Although most libre licensed products have poor image quality; I hope that improves.

Kinda hijacking the thread but... My hypothesis is that we will look back and see that Streetview imagery is a goldmine for AI and will be a path to being able to answer HARD questions about the real world.

The insane thing is there are only like 7 companies that actually have meaningful datasets.

I spent 1.5 years studying the geospatial space and went so far as buying a Mosaic51 and scanning the entire country of Andorra as a test before looking at buying the camera manufacture.

Ultimately I walked away from buying the company after issues with the family office I was working with... but long story short I believe streetview imagery will be a gold mine in the future.

If anyone is working in the space. Feel free to ping me, happy to chat and even make intros to the space. If you are training an AI, ping me as well. Happy to open my images up to the right person to make something "country scale" (160k images... every 3 meters with RTK labeled gnss data).