During WhereCamp this weekend, the guys from PictEarth flew a remote controlled plane over the Googleplex with a Nokia N95 cellphone onboard taking photos. They first flew the plane in the morning when the winds were lighter and the sun angle was high. What's really cool, is that within a couple of hours, they had selected photos processed such that they could be viewed in Google Earth. They uploaded them to the free imagery server called OpenAerialMap.org. First, you load the OpenAerialMap KML file and then fly to the Googleplex by following this KML . The imagery is super-overlayed which means it will load multiple zoom levels with more details as you get closer. You will see the imagery PictEarth took around 10:00 AM on Saturday May 17th during WhereCamp. Since this was there first run with a new plane, they didn't tell any of the attendees who were inside attending sessions. So, there aren't many people to be found in the imagery.
PictEarth's founder, David Riallant came from France to attend WhereCamp. Also involved was Jeff Johnson and Stewart Long from the USA branch of PictEarth. Stewart flew the plane. Here are some photos and video clips showing them setting up and flying the plane later in the day (NOTE: you have to click on the images to view the video clips at PicasaWeb):
For some reason, the famous "Google Pool" looks different in their imagery:
For those of you who don't know, it used to be that Google had photoshopped the Google logo on the bottom of their pool in Google Earth as shown in the screenshot above (now the base imagery shows the pool to have no logo). So, PictEarth was going to show the photoshop with their logo in the pool, but for some reason they didn't include it for the OpenAerialMap imagery.