When Google Street View was introduced, privacy advocates had a field day on their hands. Hundreds of trucks roaming the country photographing everything in their sights even sounds Orwellian. Even with Google’s automatic blurring of faces and license plates, there were still cases where StreetView was leaving people’s lives a little too transparent.

New technology from the Georgia Institute Of Technology blows StreetView out of the water. It allows information from live camera feeds to be inserted into Google Earth. Literally, cars move on the virtual freeway in sync with reality. Multiple camera angles can be merged to create smooth and detailed motion. Look in the video below to see how they can capture a soccer game in a public park, and include a virtual representation of every pass and kick on Google Earth. The system can even handle large gaps between cameras (for example, two highway traffic cams half a mile apart) and will extrapolate motion between them.

Dynamic mapping does make for a more interesting experience on Google Earth. Clouds move, rivers flow, and the roads hum with traffic. Some of this may be extremely useful. I’d love to get a 10 second fly-by of my morning commute before I left the house to see what traffic is like and check for road-work.That doesn’t mean this is worth the huge privacy cost.

This technology doesn’t require custom camera equipment or installations, which makes it compatible with existing CCTV systems. In the camera-happy UK, there are 4.2 million security cameras covering both public and private property. Just take a second and think about what it would mean if each of those cameras were connected to this software. Every step taken on a public street could be uploaded to the web in realtime – and made highly accessible. That last point is perhaps the most important. Much of our time spent in public is captured on camera, but the footage is only seen by a handful of eyes (and if the statistics are true, not very attentive ones). Technology like this would merge all of the disparate, isolated, information into one easy-to-access place. With a little facial recognition software thrown in, and some links to various social networks, this really could be the last nail in the coffin of anonymity.

Sure, there would be an uproar over sharing security camera data this way – but ultimately, technology always moves forward and information always wants to be free. Somewhere, sometime soon, a system like this will cover entire cities and towns – and having an affair will never be the same.

Tags: augmented reality, dynamic maps, google earth, privacy

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 12:00 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.