prosthetic knowledge

What Google’s Self-Driving Car ‘Sees’ 

Google’s Self-Driving Car gathers almost 1 GB per SECOND. Here’s what it “sees” making a left turn: twitter.com/Bill_Gross/sta…

— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) April 30, 2013

Google BBS Terminal

What Google would have looked like in the 80’s, put together by masswerk

Try it out here

Instant Streetview 

Instant results for Google Streetview searches in as-you-type format:

Simply start typing an address, place name or location, to be instantly taken there via Google Street View.

If no Street View exists at the location, or if your search is too broad (e.g. “France”), a map will be shown instead.

Satellite Collections by Jenny Odell 

Series of digital prints collates types of objects found on Google Satellite View and places them together:

In all of these prints, I collect things that I’ve cut out from Google Satellite View— parking lots, silos, landfills, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here.

The alienation provided by the satellite perspective reveals the things we take for granted to be strange, even absurd. Banal structures and locations can appear fantastical and newly intricate. Directing curiosity toward our own inimitably human landscape, we may find that those things that are most recognizably human (a tangle of carefully engineered water slides, for example) are also the most bizarre, the most unlikely, the most fragile.

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Bjork + Streetview 

Not a project, sadly, but if anyone is looking for a great idea for a project - this could be it: an augmented video playing over a Google Streetview map …

Discovered on my dashboard via thegoodmoment (via biscuitbottom), the images above belong to the blog ‘Hard Liquor, Soft Holes’.

Street Views Patchwork (2009) by Julien Levesque 

Intelligent net-art combines four embedded Google StreetView scenes from different places together to create a coherent landscape scene.

It works like a slideshow, but each piece section is as functional as you would expect Streetview to be - try it out here

Project ‘Ground Truth’ - How Google Builds It’s Maps 

Fascinating article on the workings on Google Maps and how it relates to the bigger picture of personal information technology - via The Atlantic:

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that’s the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you’re drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B — and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It’s the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or “Ground Truth,” actually works. 

The company opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you’re searching has become almost important as what you’re searching. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple’s iOS.

And for good reason. If Google’s mission is to organize all the world’s information, the most important challenge — far larger than indexing the web — is to take the world’s physical information and make it accessible and useful.

“If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online,” Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. “Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part.”

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Googlegeist 

Tumblr blog / art project by Chadwick Gibson, exploring the line where digital art and Google image data merge.

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ASCII Street View by Teehan+Lax Labs 

Interactive, brower-based WebGL-powered text-mode view of Google Streetview panoramas. Available in colour and green-terminal modes:

Real-time Ascii Art conversion of Google Street View panorama’s done in WebGL.

You’ll need Chrome, Firefox 8+, or another browser that supports CORS WebGL textures.

Coded by @peter_nitsch. Inspired by Sol’sTextFX library. Built with @thespite’sGoogle Street View Panorama library, and three.js.

Read about this at Teehan+Lax Labs.

Try it out here

Google Calculator 

If you type in a simple math question (ie 2*2), a calculator interface will appear at the top of the results.

Process Watch by Katja Novitskova 

Digital print for one-day art show featuring a collage of infographic data of that day:

On June 27th 2012 I did Hotel Palenque, a curatorial project of Elise Lammer. Hotel Palenque is about inviting an artist to do a one-day show that proposes two conditions: making an A0 print, and deleting the files used to make it.

Process Watch is a digital collage inframed in a outdoor poster display with two key-locks. Collage was made a few hours before the opening out of several types of real-time data from the day of the exhibition: weather reports from various cities around the world, currency exchange rates, stock exchange statistics, commodity prices, satellite footage, Moon phase and location, etc. The data gathered in the form of screenshots from the internet was then assembled in Photoshop. Fundamentally unique occurence of particular weather and economic conditions of the day were further intensified by freehand digital tool use. The print is locked in a frame and will exist as a singular piece - a document to the reality of the moment and a product of the conditions that led to it.

More Here

Chrome Web Lab: Sketchbots 

Cloud Art?

Google teams up with the Science Museum, London with five experiments connecting your computer with installations - with Sketchbots, you can upload a photo of yourself and it will be drawn by a robot on sand and watch it performed via live webcam. Here is a video:

You can try it out for yourself here

Build With Chrome 

Google and LEGO have teamed up with an online builder to create LEGO structures and place them in Google Maps, to celebrate 50 years of LEGO in Australia.

It goes without saying, but you need Google Chrome to use it, but you can check it out here.