Think of how cheezed the people who are already working on it are going to be when they find this. "I WAS ALREADY DOING IT, I DIDN'T NEED SOME CARTOONIST WITH A LIVEJOURNAL TO TELL ME ABOUT IT"
There's some wrinkles: you'd need to do some smoothing to filter out shots of accidents from the day before, say, and also filter out people who might try to grief the system, but it'll work pretty well right out of the box. You know, that was one of my first thoughts on reading your description. STOP READING MY MIND! ESPECIALLY BEFORE I'VE EVEN HAD THE THOUGHT
( ... )
Yep! But it should work long enough to get it working, and then you've got money coming in that you can use to counteract everyone trying to game it. There'll always be people taking shots of their business, and once you filter them, they'll pay others to take shots of their business, and then you build a network of trustworthiness and so on and so on until it becomes sentient!
Ryan, I like your idea! But I don't know if the quantity of photographs in an area is a good metric to determine scenic-ness. In residential areas, there will be all sorts of pictures taken of people inside homes and in back yards and whatnot. I'd actually imagine that would be where the majority of pictures would be taken (which would be interesting to test in itself!).
I would argue that at the very beginning the data would be jumbled with all of those pictures which aren't really scenic. Of course, you could always exclude any pictures with faces in them, then you would be theoretically left with pictures of scenery.
I'd probably argue that at the beginning you would need some human hand to analyze the data of picture counts and assign roads their initial "scenic" number.
Interesting, I hadn't considered that! You could probably look for big swaths of sky and ground-like colours for really-rough "is this outside" metrics. Also, tagging would help some with that too: "tree" and "mountain" are probably outside, "sister" maybe isn't.
Anyway even with these bumps, someone needs to do this, someone needs to make this happen
I have nothing to add but my appreciation for you always being on the Forefront of Innovation for Making Life More Awesome. There should be badges for this sort of thing.
Regularly updated routes would have to be done via wifi, which probably would be a hassle, or by plugging the GPS into the computer. Either way this could be an extra annoyance.
Anyway, taking the google-street view would currently only really work in cities. So I would propose that people tag streets on GSV as scenic, once a certain number had built up an admin could verify that it was scenic.
OR
A program could take the 3D version of the landscape, then using an algorithm determine a proposed prettiness based on the surrounding greenery and the views available (dictated by land-scape, i.e. if it gives a good view over a green valley. It wouldn't be able to tell if a wall is in the way, however.) and give it a rating. These would have to be moderated some how, but it would give an indication of scenic routes. This would probably work better in the country side.
Of course these are just the basis of ideas, but I'm sure someone can run with them. I don't have the know-how to go past fleshing out the idea a bit more.
Oh, I was just using GSV as an example. All you'd really need is software to scan Flickr's images by geotag, and push that into your map database. But yeah!
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You know, that was one of my first thoughts on reading your description. STOP READING MY MIND! ESPECIALLY BEFORE I'VE EVEN HAD THE THOUGHT ( ... )
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I would argue that at the very beginning the data would be jumbled with all of those pictures which aren't really scenic. Of course, you could always exclude any pictures with faces in them, then you would be theoretically left with pictures of scenery.
I'd probably argue that at the beginning you would need some human hand to analyze the data of picture counts and assign roads their initial "scenic" number.
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Anyway even with these bumps, someone needs to do this, someone needs to make this happen
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DO I NEED TO CONNECT ALL THE DOTS HERE
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Anyway, taking the google-street view would currently only really work in cities. So I would propose that people tag streets on GSV as scenic, once a certain number had built up an admin could verify that it was scenic.
OR
A program could take the 3D version of the landscape, then using an algorithm determine a proposed prettiness based on the surrounding greenery and the views available (dictated by land-scape, i.e. if it gives a good view over a green valley. It wouldn't be able to tell if a wall is in the way, however.) and give it a rating. These would have to be moderated some how, but it would give an indication of scenic routes. This would probably work better in the country side.
Of course these are just the basis of ideas, but I'm sure someone can run with them. I don't have the know-how to go past fleshing out the idea a bit more.
Lack_26
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