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Google adds SA wilderness to Street View

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 22 Aug 2017
The Street View Trekker camera weighs 25kg and is worn like a backpack.
The Street View Trekker camera weighs 25kg and is worn like a backpack.

Google today announced a new gallery called Discover South Africa on Google Street View.

Potential visitors to the country, South Africans abroad, or anyone interested, will now be able to experience the country's scenery in 360-degree imagery without having to travel there.

The new sites in the gallery include: Chapman's Peak Lookout in the Western Cape, Lanner Gorge in the Kruger National Park, Bourke's Luck Potholes in Mpumalanga, and the Tugela Gorge Hike in KwaZulu-Natal.

In 2012, Google started capturing images of places that cars could not necessarily reach, with the Street View Trekker ? a wearable backpack with a camera system on top. It includes 15 cameras that each point in a different direction and a photo is taken on each camera in unison every 2.5 seconds as the operator walks. The battery on the system can last around six to eight hours.

"The Trekker is worn by an operator and is walked through pedestrian walkways or trails on foot, automatically gathering images as it goes. That imagery is then stitched together to create the 360-degree panoramas you see today in Google Maps," Google says in a statement.

"This is all part of Google Maps' efforts to make the world's diverse heritage and beauty accessible to everyone."

The company mapped out a few key areas around the world, including Table Mountain and Robben Island, before opening up the process to companies and individuals around the world to map out the lesser known places.

Travel company Drive South Africa, a division of Discover Africa Group, was one of the first partners in the Google Street View camera loan programme in SA and mapped out the latest gallery.

Andre Van Kets, co-founder and marketing director of Discover Africa Group, says over the period of nine months, 250 volunteers have trekked across all nine provinces, along 170 trails, visiting 19 national parks and 12 others.

He says they have collected 35 terabytes of footage and taken over 250 000 individual photographs.

All the trails are not available yet, but will be released in stages over the next few months.

This type of 360-degree, panoramic imagery is now available in 66 countries, including parts of the Arctic and Antarctica.

Sven Tresp, Street View special collections programme manager, says there is a programme under way which sees shopping malls, airports and transportation hubs mapped out using the Trekker, but this has yet to launch in SA.

Users can view these new tours on smartphones, tablets or computers. They do not have to wear a virtual reality headset, but there is that option too.

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