Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#31

Post by chrsstrm » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 10:21 AM UTC

bretthoerner wrote: post #30

chrsstrm wrote: post #29

If you have ever used street view to catch a glimpse of your destination at an unknown address or to look for key landmarks at important intersections, you'll notice right away that the Street View data is the last thing you would want powering an autonomous car. Many of the mapped roads only show the view from one lane, and if the road is more than one lane wide, you're missing data on the positions of the other lan…

I think you misunderstood the point of machine learning. The cars don't drive by memorization/knowledge of each street but rather the knowledge of what has been done in similar situations thousands of times before.

Yes, my point being that even after five years of mapping, they still don't have those thousands of similar situations to use as reliable data set.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#32

Post by rmc » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 10:22 AM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #4

I thought Google's Street View cars couldn't drive very fast to be able to take those pictures. When not driving at full speed, it's not really a good learning set. Also the link says they get to "know every road by definition", but you could read that almost entirely from TomTom's maps as well. Roads change, weather conditions change, etc. I'm not so sure Google really uses their Street View car data for their self-…

I thought Google's Street View cars couldn't drive very fast to be able to take those pictures

Google Street View cars can be seen overtaking other vehicles sometimes, so they go fast enough.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#33

Post by uuilly » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 10:22 AM UTC

I worked for a company that made the first two street view systems. They also contributed a lot to the robocar project and eventually got bought by google to work on Chauffeur.

The sensors and math that provide the perception component of chauffeur are, for conversational purposes, identical to those of street view. But the two teams are not working together. The demands of each project are too different.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#34

Post by cypherpnks » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 10:30 AM UTC

This is kind of a no-duh, sherlock non-story.

Fact 1: Sebastian Thrun co-developed Google StreetView

Fact 2: Sebastian Thrun is developing the driverless car.

A lot more goes into a self-driving car than data from how drivers drive. That's maybe 3% of the problem. Nevertheless, assuming Sebastian is too dumb to make the connection would assume a fairly high level of stupidity on his part. That's a pretty bad assumption.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#35

Post by vezycash » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 11:24 AM UTC

damian2000 wrote: post #20

vezycash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you forgot to add the project glass thing. Ads would literally be in your face! Sometime in the future, they'll also be able to control people's psyche through all the glass thing to mask their evil doings.

Plan is to project the ads onto the windscreen of your car - since its driverless you don't need to see out of it anymore. ;-)

so the screen would be touch screen or something lol. How would the ads be tracked or interacted with if the ads are on the windshield?

I'm assuming the car owner would be sitting at the back.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#36

Post by zyb09 » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 11:41 AM UTC

It sure fits nicely together, but I doubt this was the plan all along. Google general strategy seems to be to collect as much data as possible just in case it might become useful one day. Good decision to load up the StreetView cars not just with cameras for pictures, but with all kinds of sensors to collect a bunch of potentially useful metrics. That data is becoming handy for quite a few things now.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#37

Post by tomelders » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 11:46 AM UTC

idan wrote: post #28

One big hole in the logic: Street view cars all work during the daytime. There is no nighttime street imagery on streetview, and anecdotally, I've never seen a streetview car at night. Having self-driving cars during daylight hours only is still an ambitious goal, though.

I don't think that would matter. Googles driverless cars use 3D laser scanners which don't require any ambient light. Plus, computers can theoretically see a lot more of the spectrum and therefore see a lot more than we mere mortals. They could look at the road ahead an know exactly what temperature it is, and possibly even see black ice. They could see a ninja on a black horse, at night, in the rain and fog, from miles away using thermal imaging.

Daylight driving, to a machine, would probably be more difficult than night time driving simply because there's more stuff happening on the roads during the day.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#38

Post by tomelders » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 11:54 AM UTC

If I squint my eyes and ignore all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars, then I suppose this could be true.

I sometimes enjoy these sorts of articles. They're the fan-fiction of the tech world and it's no different to the sort of conjecture people like to come up with for Apple, which can be shameless fun to read.

But when there's already a ton of information out there about how Google's driverless cars work, it just seems cheap and hollow.

Also, I don't get the title.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#39

Post by riffraff » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 11:59 AM UTC

uuilly wrote: post #33

I worked for a company that made the first two street view systems. They also contributed a lot to the robocar project and eventually got bought by google to work on Chauffeur. The sensors and math that provide the perception component of chauffeur are, for conversational purposes, identical to those of street view. But the two teams are not working together. The demands of each project are too different.

it also feels that in some cases the data would simply be useless, e.g. data collected in rome and other historical cities by pedaling bikes in pedestrian areas.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#40

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Jun 05, 2012, 12:10 PM UTC

tomelders wrote: post #38

If I squint my eyes and ignore all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars, then I suppose this could be true. I sometimes enjoy these sorts of articles. They're the fan-fiction of the tech world and it's no different to the sort of conjecture people like to come up with for Apple, which can be shameless fun to read. But when there's already a ton of information out there about how Google'…

> all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars

Are you referring here to fact that the driverless cars follow pre-determined paths rather than reading traffic signals? Or do you just mean that the proposed motivation doesn't really hold water? Because it seems pretty plausible to me that streetview data could be very useful to the drtiverless car, even if other data is more important and even if streetview is better motivated on its own.