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Camera Meets Speedometer, Travel Across Country Together 290

Posted by chrisd from the digital-would-have-been-easier dept.
BluKnight writes "This guy hacked his camera to his speedometer, and ended up taking a picture EVERY MILE during a trip across the US. Kodak has the results (Flash in use!) of this venture. For my next hack, I'm going to interface to my digital camera to take a picture every time I blink -- I'll never miss what I'm seeing again!" The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film) The interactive map is -really- well done, but requires flash...
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Camera Meets Speedometer, Travel Across Country Together More

Camera Meets Speedometer, Travel Across Country Together

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  • I really hate to inform you of this... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But that's an ODOMETER. Try again, okay?

  • speedometer? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bellings ( 137948 )
    Wouldn't it have been easier to hook the camera to his odometer, instead of the speedometer?
    • I was in .au in februari and every once in a while there are `speedochecks' on the motorway. Just a sign every kilometer for 5 kms saying 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Have you ever tried to drive 1km/h in a car? Impossible! Especially on the motorway:P

      • Re:speedometer? (Score:2, Informative)

        by marauder ( 30027 )
        They've fixed them, or at least some of them. The F3 now has an odometer check length. But "speedometer" check length actually works better for their purposes, because the reason the check lengths are there is to give you something to do every so often so you don't fall asleep and die. And it certainly seemed to get *you* thinking, even if you didn't count off the clicks :-)
      • alternatively, you could not be a retard and drive 60 mph and see if it takes you one minute to drive one mile...

    • Re:speedometer? (Score:2, Informative)

      by mazachan ( 126721 )
      I believe the speedometer and the odometer are hooked up on the same wire, which makes sense if you think about it..

    • Re:speedometer? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Masem ( 1171 )
      I'm sure that they meant odometer (the dial that measures distance the car travels), but there's no reason that you can't build a program that integrates a real-time reading from the speedometer (the dial that indicates your speed) to get at distance, and thus to count off every mile. In fact, assuming that the speedometer signal is electronic in nature (such as 0 speed = 0 mV, 120 mph = 5mV) it's probably easier to grab this value than to mechanically grab the odometer value.

      • Re:speedometer? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by FyRE666 ( 263011 )
        I think you'll find the speedo/odo assembly receives pulses from the gearbox output shaft. So in fact the odometer is being driven more directly than the speedometer (which uses the pulses/time to display the speed).

        At least that was the case for truck tachograph units when I worked on them a long long time ago...
      • the faster you move, the more rapid the pulses. Makes for easy detection and calculation (and also allows you to display speed while in reverse)

        The odometer is also tied into this.. in fact, most odometers of the past several years have used stepper motors to turn the digits. In the past 2 years most manufacturers have dispensed with that completely and gone to a digital display.

    • Wouldn't it have been easier to hook the camera to his odometer, instead of the speedometer?

      Hey, maybe you could rig it to take a photo every time your speed drops below 50 mph. You might get some exciting pictures of stoplights, motels, convenience stores, etc.

      Cheers,
      IT

  • I can hear them now... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:17PM (#3293211)
    Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
  • It Works great on this site :-)
  • I got to where I could do all that in less than a minute, while steering with my kneecap."


    And we thought people talking on a cell phone were hazardous.... Doesn't Kodak make an extended roll for professionals, too? I'd think a 200 frame magazine would have been a lot handier, although a pain to change out compared to a standard roll.

    • Re:Stopped? (Score:3, Informative)

      by psavo ( 162634 )
      Well.. it's not Kodak that makes the, but maker of camera.
      For example Nikon has 250 [mir.com.my] & 750 [mir.com.my] frame (check them out -- huge) 'backs'. You need to take back from your camera and change it.

      Of course you need lots of film for that too. Pretty much standard is 100ft (30.5m) or 55ft (17m) rolls (with these you can fill standard 36 exposure canisters). That is enough for about 800 exposures.
      • Of course you need lots of film for that too. Pretty much standard is 100ft (30.5m) or 55ft (17m) rolls (with these you can fill standard 36 exposure canisters). That is enough for about 800 exposures.


        You're a little bit off there. A 100 foot roll of bulk load film is good for about 18 rolls, 36 exposures each. 36*18 = 648 exposures, not 800.


        Also, the equipment you linked to doesn't appear to work with any autofocus Nikon bodies, something that I think would be pretty vital in this situation.


        On that note, I would use a Canon body. The optics are nearly as good as Nikon, and the autofocus system is much faster, and in my experience, more reliably hits the objects you really wanted.

        • You're a little bit off there. A 100 foot roll of bulk load film is good for about 18 rolls, 36 exposures each. 36*18 = 648 exposures, not 800.

          Well, yeh, probably.
          I calculated it this way: 30.5*100*10mm/((36mm+2mm)/exposure) ~= 802 (exposures).
          Remember that with single back there is no need to 'loose' exposures when reloading. (2-4 exposures/36exposure roll).

          I believe AF is not importaint here as I would use a 16/20mm at hyperfocal.

          About Canon, all is nice and swell, but I failed my google search for canon large-amount exposure back. D'you know if they have some or what is their solution for that?

  • getting out more often (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:26PM (#3293273) Journal
    Perople who do not get out enough rarely have any notion as to just how $%#$&^@ huge the country is.

    Even if you spent an evening just looking at skimming through these, you could get an idea.

    It used to be that people often lived their whole lives within walking distance of their home village. You can easily have the equivalent of that today, with close knit communities of other types.

  • Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dimator ( 71399 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:27PM (#3293281) Homepage Journal
    They [kodak.com] were beautiful, weren't they?

    • Re:Damn... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mr.Intel ( 165870 ) <mrintel173&yahoo,com> on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:33PM (#3293320) Homepage Journal
      I'm glad they didn't edit those out like so many movies have. It's a shame to attempt to erase from media what should be an icon of human endeavor.

  • Reminds me of Confluence.org (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Viking Coder ( 102287 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:28PM (#3293291)
    Check out Confluence [confluence.org], which is another cool project involving digital images and geographic locations. Their goal is to take a photo at every confluence point - an intersection of integer longitude and latitude points. Very fun, very cool.

    This [orbitals.com] is a cool map, showing where they have photos, and is fully navigable.
  • I had some time on my hands once, so I drove from San Jose to Portland to New York to San Diego and then back home. Oh yeah - and a quick visit to Tijuana, for horse tacos or whatever they put in them. Total miles 7K+ in 10 days (I stayed at each stop for a day or two - other than that it was solid driving).

    I'll tell you folks, there ain't that much to see from behind the wheel of a car. It's mostly grass.
    Anyone who thinks the US is overpopulated has probably never left their home city.
    • You think that's bad, I went Denver, Calgary, Vancouver (the scenic way through Jasper, not straight across), then down to Portland and back in about the same time.

      Since I was only in Calgary overnight, I had driven over 3000 miles with relatively little vehicular traffic between Denver and Calgary. (I highly recommend I-15 in southern Montana in a sports car.) Once I left Banff, I started filling up at every station because there was no guarantee that the next station was open, that the road wasn't closed due to a landslide or avalanche, etc.

      I'm a glutton for punishment - this was actually a test run for a drive to Alaska in a non-RV - but I agree that the people who stay in cities have no idea of just how empty much of this continent is. Or just how large the large cities are - it can take hours to cross Vancouver or Seattle even if traffic is going at full speed.
  • This is a cool concept, thought it was cool when I saw it a before, and had the sigh of discontent when the only picture that I knew the area of, instead of hitting the gates of Rose-Hulman [rose-hulman.edu], he instead managed to get the gas station in front of the "barn". [kodak.com]

    The barn is supposedly where the Last IBM Mainframe ever used at Rose was housed, according to urban legend circa 1982.

    --Mike--

  • Fishy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Brian Kendig ( 1959 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:35PM (#3293325)
    There's something fishy with the pictures. Many of them are just *too* picturesque to be believable. Look at pictures 613 and 614, for example; they're both ends of the same service station! The same jeep is even in both pictures! Is this service station really a mile long?

    • Just a guess, but I think it's valid to think that this guy actually stopped!!! :)

      Umh, I don't dee hat you're talking about, but if you see the gas station twice, maybe he went there in the afternoon and stayed in a hotel room close to that station and then came back there in the morning to get gas?

      You notice that all of the shots are during the daylight hours...the photos wouldn't have turned out too well otherwise :)
    • There's something fishy with the pictures.
      I agree - they look "staged." For example, picture 3294 is an exact, framed shot of the Transamerica Building. I also notice that his camera wasn't aimed in the direction he drove. If so, he would've seen the UFOs, flying cows and other hallucinations during that drive from Kansas City to Denver (Highway 70 is as straight as an arrow form horizon to horizon and there ain't jack sh*t from end to end) - shots 1314 to about 1965. Strange that he gets interesting shots of houses 'n stuff, when supposedly he's zooming by.

      I have to admit that if I were taking pictures on a cross-country jaunt, I wouldn't mount said camera to take snaps out the front windscreen, otherwise I'd get many picturesque shots of the splattered bugs, burger wrappers on the dash, the Thomas Map and all the other nasty bits that live up there.

      Question: If you're going 70-100 mph (as you are wont to do in that godforsaken wasteland), and you have your camera set to maximum shutter speed with very fast film (1000 speed), will your pictures be blurred beyond recognition if your camera pointed out the side window?

      • Question: If you're going 70-100 mph (as you are wont to do in that godforsaken wasteland), and you have your camera set to maximum shutter speed with very fast film (1000 speed), will your pictures be blurred beyond recognition if your camera pointed out the side window?

        Not with a professional camera... My wife has a very nice professional grade 35mm camera. She took some pictures of me sitting in my ultralight with the engine running & prop spinning. In every shot, the prop looks perfectly still.

        Now I know damn well that prop was spinning a lot faster as far as the film was concerned than looking out the side of a car at 70+mph...

    • Re:Fishy (Score:3, Informative)

      by Mr.Intel ( 165870 )
      Look at pictures 613 and 614, for example; they're both ends of the same service station! The same jeep is even in both pictures! Is this service station really a mile long?

      OK, first there is no jeep. Second, 612 [kodak.com] is grass/sky, 613 [kodak.com] is a service stations and 614 [kodak.com] is grass/sky
    • I'm not sure where you're looking but this is what I see:

      [613] - Picture of a service station
      [614] - Picture of an empty field
  • Have you ever driven across the US? I did it four times when I was in the military. The time I drove the speed limited 24ft U-Haul across was not very fun but the other three were. I truely enjoyed the experience. You DO NOT need an SUV or minivan to have a good time, even with a family of four. Most of my fun was because I enjoyed driving my car, a 91 Mustang GT. Nothing great but was relatively new at the time and very well suited for a long highway battle, very stable, no struggling up the hills, not taken by the wind and only 2k rpm's at 80mph.
    • You made a family of four cram into a Mustang for a cross country trip?

      I hope the two in the back were kids :)
      • My wife in front and the kids in booster seats in the back. We were moving from Seattle to Honolulu with a 3 month school in South Carolina. My house got packed up and everything shipped from Seattle. We had to fill the hatch with everything we would need from March (cold) until the early July (Hot)and make the trip from Seattle to San Francisco via South Carolina. The time was split between relatives and motels. The whole evolution went perfect and we all enjoyed it. You don't have to have a suv/minivan to travel. I still have the Mustang (160k+ miles)and also have a minivan and a suv too..

  • I always wondered... (Score:3, Funny)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:36PM (#3293330) Journal
    The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls.

    So that's who's still buying film.

  • Notice on the "slide show" they have Arizona labled "COLORADO".

    You'd think a site about photographing the various states of the USA, that they could get the state names right.
  • Why not take pictures of every building and lot in a City? It would be cheap, and way cool to look back on in a few years. I'm considering doing a small section of Chicago (a VERY small section of Chicago).

    I could then put in some coordinates from the GPS, and viola, a cool project.

    --Mike--

    • The City of Olympia, Washington did this in 1937 (maybe a Depression jobs program?). I got the photo of my house last week, which will help us restore our 1926 bungelow [bigelow-springs.net] to its original condition.

      Every city should do this every 20 years; it's great when you are trying to learn about the historyof your community.

  • I wanted to do something like this...kudos to the guy for actually doing it.

    A couple years ago my now-wife and I took a road trip in a 19-foot van named MURR! (that was really its name). We took two months, just about, and drove down from Vancouver, BC down to San Diego, across to Texas and New Orleans, up through Kentucky (Hi Amelie!), Ohio and Milwaukee (Hi Melissa!), then to Ontario, across the northern States again, up through Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC...home again, jiggity-jog. All told, 20,700 km (speak metric, American dogs!).

    My idea was to get a Super-8 camera and a timer. I calculated that one frame every minute would, over two months, add up to about an hour of footage, which seemed the perfect length for a documentary-ish sort of thing -- narration, music, whatnot.

    It was during the leadup to takeoff that I discovered that a camera that could do this wouldn't come cheap -- I think the one place I checked said >$1k, which scared the pants off me. The van and everything else cost a lot more than I'd expected, and as it was we ended up coming back with something like $50 in our pocket (which to my mind means our timing was perfect).

    What I would do now is get a laptop and a webcam. I work at a small ISP, and one of our customers is a construction company that has a webcam and a FreeBSD box set up to take time-lapse photography of their latest construction site. The pix and movies are really neat, and that would have been a much easier and cheaper solution.

    Crap...just realized that the worst part of me sitting here and reminiscing like this is that the guy's site is sure to be slashdotted now...oh well, I'll wait 'til Sunday when his server's cooled down a bit.

  • Clear a few things up. (Score:4, Informative)

    by jonnythan ( 79727 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:39PM (#3293345)
    If you READ THE SITE,the guy actually changed rolls every 36 miles, but he didn't necessarily stop.
    Shooting through an open window meant no air-conditioning, so he kept the Kodak 5028 VPH film in a cooler. "I would count the miles," he says. "As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number on a log sheet, take the next one out of the cooler, and insert it. I got to where I could do all that in less than a minute, while steering with my kneecap."
    Also, it was actually attached to his odometer, not speedometer, and he could delay each picture for a moment with a switch if he liked.
    Every time a mile ended, a device attached to the odometer made an electric contact that triggered the shutter release. If a cement wall or other nearby object blocked the view, he had a switch that would delay a picture for a moment.
    And, he did it all twice. First time in a porsche along the interstate, which didn't go so well. Second time in an Explorer along old highways.

    Way nifty :D
    • Also, it was actually attached to his odometer, not speedometer, and he could delay each picture for a moment with a switch if he liked.

      Ah, as I thought. That explains the not-so-random composition of some of the shots.

  • Don't you mean the odometer? You know, the device that tells you how many miles your car has traveled.
  • Crazy! Why wouldn't he take a 35mm cine camera capable of single frame exposures and change films, oh, perhaps not at all? If Kodak want to show off their film that would still do it.
  • Does anyone know when he did this? I noticed in the 1-mile marker shot, the World Trade Center towers are still there.

    Also, don't BluKnight and chrisd know the difference between a speedometer and an odometer? Even *I* know that, and I don't know anything about cars... put another one on the "editor who didn't read the article" pile.
  • "As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number on a log sheet, take the next one out of the cooler, and insert it. I got to where I could do all that in less than a minute, while steering with my kneecap."

    At least he wasn't driving some dangerous vehicle while performing these stunts, like a Ford Explorer!

    On his first try, he drove a Porsche and "didn't do enough research," he says. On his next trip, in a high-slung Ford Explorer, he traveled on old highways, mostly U.S. 30, 40 and 50.

    Doh?

  • If only... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Aniquel ( 151133 )
    ... he'd hooked it up to include the GPS coordinates and orientation of each picture!
  • Especially considering his photos end up being displayed as about 100x200 pixels, a digital camera would have made this a *ton* easier. Not to mention, if he hadn't gotten sponsored by Kodak, the film (& development) of this would have cost about $3000.
  • How many people obviously didn't read the damn story?

    He used his odometer.

    He used a camera with FILM.

    He didn't have to stop to change the film.

    At night he would mark the last mile, find a motel, sleep.

    Then he would resume the trip at the last mile.

    Ahhhg. Please mod this +5 redundant and email to all your friends for the ultimate in redundacy.

  • except he strapped an ATX mobo, DC/DC converter, and a tonne of led acid batteries to his body.

    He then ducttaped a webcam to his shoulder and grabbed images every few seconds, saving them to a laptop disk. The next mission was to have that dialed up to a cellphone to post images to the net every few mins - but i dont know how far he got with that.

    • Except that when he tried to fly back to Toronto, they ripped all the stuff off of him and he's now drooling on the side of a hospital while doctors experiment on him.

      Or am I thinking of someone else?

  • End of Tourism (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Beliskner ( 566513 )
    Finally, this can put the world wide into the world wide web

    The ultimate open source - every spot in the world on camera, everybody in the world is everyone elses' big brother => lots of little brothers. I don't see why anybody would want to travel abroad now, just take these pictures in London (England), Macchu Pichu (Andes), ancient ruins as of yet unnamed (Bolivia), Pyramids (Egypt). Personally I can spend a few months at this site alone if it was big enough, honestly. Just look at the success of Webshots [webshots.com] and that just spews out pictures of rabbits, mountains, dogs, cats all at random. Nothing can beat the Dallas skyline on a beautiful red sunset evening reflecting off the skyscrapers with hazy-red skyline. Nice. I'm sure there are lots of other places with views just as spectacular but nobody has ever been there or heard of it.

    For instance, an architect would love to see places with beautiful buildings, the travel agent doesn't give two hoots about what building is where and who made it. This architect can just log on and see the building structure in Spain, France, Canada, Russia, heck even Vietnam and other thrid world countries.

    A computer programmer would want to see the last remaining building with a VAX inside to mourn (or last Win 95 machine to celebrate), the travel agent would have no idea what he is talking about, but the computer programmer could call up any worlwide location at will so it's not a problem.

    I can't imagine how many people there are in Oklahoma or whatever that can't afford travelling to Canada or France or England or Mexico or Brazil. This way they can get one heck of a taste. Brilliant idea, I'll be watching this closely.

  • hook it up to your GPS instead (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mmusn ( 567069 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:58PM (#3293426)
    It's probably more useful to hook up a camera to a GPS system. That way, not only can you snap a picture every mile, you can also record where exactly it was snapped without having to make guesses.

  • Do it digital... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kzinti ( 9651 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @06:58PM (#3293429) Homepage Journal
    The best part is the fact that he stopped every 36 miles to swap film rolls. Sad thing is, I understand this. (I still love film).

    But this sounds like a situation where a digital camera is better suited. The purpose of this is not to create single great photos, where film is still much better suited, but to create a series of photos to be strung together and viewed as an animation or hypermedia/nonlinear form.

    Connect the digital camera to a laptop, and let the laptop monitor the odometer. The computer can click off the photos at the appropriate intervals, download them, and rescale them on the fly (for f in *.jpg; do djpeg $f | pnmscale -xy 640 480 | cjpeg -q 85 > s-$f && rm $f; done). Or with sufficient disk space, you might not need to rescale the photos. At any rate, let the computer manage the image acquisition - never stop to change film, never fill up the camera's flash memory, and stop only for gas and Dr Pepper.

    As someone who loves to make timelapses with my Kodak DC290, I have actually though of doing something like this - mounting the camera in the car and programming it to take photos every 30 to 60 seconds. Syncing to the odometer is a cool touch!

    --Jim
    • Well.. If we had full-frame digiatl cameras, that would be.. Great.
      For example some 16mm lens weould be pretty nice thing on digital. but as most digital (serious) SLR's have 1,6x magnification, you need something like 8mm fisheye (which is pretty damn expensive.. and not even full-frame.)
    • One of the coolest art projects I ever saw was done buy a guy who took a Polaroid every 4 hours for an entire year of his life no matter where he was, or what he was doing. They were displayed sequentially on the gallery wall. Included were shots of him taking a dump, and a lot of (365?) 4am dead-of-night-in-bed pictures. Think of what a pain in the ass this must have been! IMHO, totally worth it however.

  • speedometer??? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Gameshow Bob ( 31940 )
    wouldn't it be his odometer?
  • This person's project is actually a very crude version of a special camera system used by many state transportation authorities to map freeways.

    I believe that California's CalTrans has special movies that show the view out front on a freeway that has pictures taken every 50 feet or so. I remember seeing a news report on KCRA (Sacramento's main TV station) about these pretty amazing movies.
  • this is the kind of project where technology in the form of a digital camera would have been nice :) This is a cool project though. No matter how good digitals get, nothing bets a good 35mm


  • When i drove from CT, CA in 3 days, i took rolls of picture while driving of, landmarks, and pictures of speedlimit signs, with my speedometer in the frame. one shot in colorado was a 75mph zone, and i was going 126mph, and there was a vw passat overtaking me.
  • Michael Naimark, a famous interactive artist, put something similar together many years ago here in California. His project was based on Caltrans footage that was taken at 100 frames per mile along El Camino Real in Silicon Valley. Looks like it was done in 1975 and 1987. Check it out at http://www.naimark.net/projects/elcamino.html
  • <humor>
    Wasn't Matt the same guy that's been on those Subway commercials 'cause he lost a ton of weight eating subs? Man this guy gets around...
    </humor>
  • Speedometer measures speed. Odometer measures distance. I don't even have to read the article to see that detail.
  • I've also wanted to do this for some time.

    Let's see, there were some VR guys that mounted a camera on a bike and took side-looking photos every few feet through some Colorado town, and put together a VR tour of the place. I'm moving in a month or so and wanted to do the same for where I've lived for the past decade.

    Games [puzz.com] magazine once had a puzzle consisting of a dozen photos along a very similar route; the goal was to put them into the proper order. It wasn't too hard for me, as I've driven from my house (St. Louis, MO) to my then-mother-in-law's house (Columbus, OH) more times that I can count. Going the other direction, some friends from college and I drove to Colorado for spring skiing for way too many years. So, yeah, I know I-70 pretty well.

    A year ago, I drove my oldest son to Boston to attend college [smfa.edu] and took pictures with a PalmPix almost every step of the way, mostly of things that had always intriged me but that I hadn't seen for years. In particular, there used to be an old barn just east of the Indiana-Ohio state line that was painted with one of the old Apollo pictures of Earth rising over the lunar horizon. It was gone (or repainted) on my last trip through, so don't bother looking for it now. If anyone has any recollections, or better yet pictures, post a reply to this.

    Well, that's all for now, I guess. I'm going to scroll through those pictures looking for things that I recognize.

  • odometer, not speedometer (Score:4, Informative)

    by byrd77 ( 171150 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @07:22PM (#3293536) Homepage
    looks like he hacked his odometer, not his speedometer. Odometers click off the miles, speedometers tell you how fast yer goin'.

    I read the post and envisioned a flash sequence of speedometer readings - ooh look, he's back up at 85 again... doh must've been pulled over, we're stopped.

  • An American flag on Slashdot is supposed to mean "bad news". What is it doing on this story?

  • Where's the speedometer? (Score:5, Funny)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Friday April 05, 2002 @08:02PM (#3293667) Homepage
    I misunderstood. I tought it meant he took a picture of the speedometer every mile. For some reason, I was strangely disappointed to find that this was not the case.
  • WSDOT has SRweb [wa.gov] which is a software tool that allows users to view digital images of the State Highway System via a web browser. SRview was first created and designed for WSDOT's internal use; however, it was soon recognized that SRview would also be beneficial for the general public's use with little or no technical impact to the user. Thus, SRweb was created.

    Now I just hope that I don't slashdot the sight.

  • "The interactive map is -really- well done, but requires flash..."

    I've seen plenty of places where flash is used well to do things that otherwise couldn't be done. Despite all the anti-flash sentiment around here, it's not flash or macromedia itself which sucks, it's designers which insist on making kludgy, overbranded, full-flash sites which suck. Macromedia is actually trying to educate its users about usability [macromedia.com] and trying to encourage them in the next flash.

    Flash ain't a bad tool, but only in the right places, and this is one of the better uses I've seen...


  • I think this is a neat art project, but this would have been much easier to do with a digital camera, GPS, and a latop. No stopping to change rolls of film. No worrying about sequencing the rolls. Easier to make into a flash movie. A hell of a lot cheaper to process.

    I do like this idea. I may have to try it on my motorcycle for my next long trip. :)
  • Some years ago, some dude here in Iceland [cia.gov] did hookup a movie camera to a car's odometer and took one frame every kilometer. Then he drove road no. 1, the road that more or less circles the country, and made a 1 hr. movie out of it. I have only seen parts of it, and it is really weird, AFAIR, you more or less follow the speed of sound.
    Here [imdb.com] is the result, btw.
  • Went through these, fun to see that they went pretty close to my permanent home (huber heights, ohio -- east of vandalia, ohio on the map) and I think the closest picture to my home is #666! Huber Heights, Ohio the mark of the beast indeed. Well, we did have a kenny rogers roasters restaurant for a while.....yech.

    And for once I'm glad to see an application of flash that is interactive, well-designed, doesn't attempt to cause epileptic seizures AND doesn't try to sell me something.
  • Picture 412 is of downtown Pittsburgh, PA... which also happens to be one of their telephone area codes!

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