Using eight cheap webcams, a GPS receiver and open-source software, West Point graduate Roy D. Ragsdale built a rig that can do what Google’s Street-View cars do: take images of the world around it and stitch them together into panoramas. The difference? This version can be carried on your head and cost just $300 to make. The hacked-together software suite can even throw out files that can be viewed in Google Earth. Ragsdale:

Construction was straightforward. On a flat octagonal heavy-cardboard base, I glued small posts for the cameras’ clips to latch onto. I aligned each unit and then placed the USB hubs and the GPS receiver in the middle. I secured the cables with Velcro and sandwiched everything with another piece of cardboard. The whole thing’s the size of a small pizza box, weighing less than 1 kilogram. Excluding the notebook (a 2-gigahertz machine with 512 megabytes of RAM running Ubuntu Linux), the hardware cost about $300.

Ragsdale tested out the camera, which he calls PhotoTrail, by walking around Boston, holding it above his head. Then, to stress the system, which grabs sets of 1280-by-1024 jpeg files in eight second bursts, he put it on top of a jeep and drove it around his home base, West Point NY. The result? Success. The camera grabbed pictures every 20 seconds at speeds of up to 100 kilometers per hour (62mph).

Ragsdale is hoping that a tool like this could be useful to soldiers – for instance, making a visual record when patrolling dangerous routes. But it could be useful in a wide variety of civilian situations, too.

Ragsdale plans on shrinking the kit even further: the webcams can shed their bulky plastic cases, and replacing the laptop which controls the cameras with a custom-made circuit board could make it “small enough to be integrated into a headband or hat.”

You hear that, Google? Hire this guy to make you a camera and send it to me. I’ll shoot the tiny streets of my city that you left out of your Street View and send them to you. You’re welcome.

DIY Street-View Camera [IEEE Spectrum. Thanks, Erico!]

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