Apple realizing this was important makes me think it is even more important for all of us to have the same kind of data in the public domain.
If someone can pony up 100K (what it costs to retrofit a car like the one pictured in the article) I could fund someone to drive it for 6 months around Barranquilla, Santa Marta and Cartagena in Colombia and put out an open dataset. I promise return the heavily used hardware after the 6 months and work with archive.org to publish it for posterity, then someone else can do the same in another country. Even if it takes us 30 years, it's worth doing.
well there is always mapillary which only requires a single smartphone camera at the least. some people go the extra mile and mount a camera pointing each direction, others use 360 cameras. you can also upload dash cam video and it will extract photos from it.
its sort of like quantity over quality. google/apple map cars record great quality but there is too much area to cover so they can only update maybe every few years. (some places still arent on google street view yet).
whereas most people have decent cameras on their phones these days so the area they travel around could potentially be updated more often, just with lower quality
the photos are analysed in much the same way as described in the article... faces and licence plates are blurred, a (rough) 3d point cloud is made, street signs are analysed and objects are segmented (which they will be using for.
unfortunately mapillary is not public domain but its still a better system than each company recording their own streetview data and keeping it to themselves. it just seems ridiculous for each company to put so much effort into creating a full detailed map of the world when they could all just be contributing to one map (like openstreetmap)
If someone can pony up 100K (what it costs to retrofit a car like the one pictured in the article) I could fund someone to drive it for 6 months around Barranquilla, Santa Marta and Cartagena in Colombia and put out an open dataset. I promise return the heavily used hardware after the 6 months and work with archive.org to publish it for posterity, then someone else can do the same in another country. Even if it takes us 30 years, it's worth doing.