[zaphos]

Niantic's Ingress kind of demo'd an early approach to this idea of pedestrians doing map data collection -- http://simplify360.com/blog/ingress-how-google-is-gamifying-...

Quote: > The game is always prompting the player about his location. In this regard, Michael Carney from PandoDaily said, “To capture a Portal, and harvest the “energy” contained therein for his respective team, a user must physically go to a location and check in. additional energy is available by travelling specific walking paths, bike paths, and inner-city routes dictated by the company, all while the user’s Android device is transmitting GPS and accelerometer data. In some cases, the user will be required to photograph locations or objects along those routes.”

[leoc]

Quite literally trading magic beans to punters, noice. For high-value pedestrian-only areas it would also be quite viable to send out Google employees or gig-workers. Likely with dedicated hardware, which wouldn't have to be very big or alarming: a consumer WinMR headset is already doing a first approximation of the kind of scanning you'd want.