Hardware Rental uptake and examples?

Personally I decided to buy my own 360 Camera, a Xiaomi version. The main reason for doing this is that for me I couldn't commit 3 consecutive weekends to maximise the use of the rental model. I have seen @gregorymarler excellent videos and his Mapillary uploads but wondered if there were any other upoads from people here. It didn't look like anyone was renting it when looking at the calendar?

Hi Steve,

I have the Waylens at the moment. The OSMUK account is now #108 in the all-time leaderboard and 6th for this month :D http://www.openstreetcam.com/leaderboard

Tracks can be seen at http://www.openstreetcam.com/user/osmuk-waylens

Short (20-40 min) journeys will upload overnight, but a long (4hr+) journey took 1.5 days.

I am in Brighton and try to vary my route each time I go out. The sad thing i've noticed is how seldom I leave the confines of the city these days. ;)

Screenshot 2019-01-08 at 8.44.59 am.png
- Jez

Thanks Jez, it's good to see the uploads to OpenStreetCam from the Waylens. I have looked at using my Dashcam for street level imagery but I have to extract the frames from the video, crop etc and the quality after all of this is not great but still usable. This time of year most of my driving is in the dark, when it becomes a bit lighter and I have some time off work I will see about renting the Waylens.

The idea for the 360 rental was to allow people to get a tester before committing to buying their own. It's been rented a half dozen times. It seems that Gregory's videos have been well received, especially if you bought yours after watching the video. Hopefully we can get his help to do a waylens video.

How long do you think the rental period should be?

Thanks Rob. I think the rental length is probably about right for most people. I just didn't want to hog the camera and not have the time to actually use it. I had already been looking at cameras for uploading to Mapillary, seeing Gregory's video helped me make a decision along with some browsing of their forums, so the intended purpose of the program definitely worked. For anyone wanting to buy a 360 camera, you can buy the LG 360 the same as the rental program for between £40-£50 if you lurk on Ebay for a while. The Xiaomi I've just bought was £165 from Aliexpress but the image quality should be a lot better and if I decide I'm not using it could be resold for over £100. I should have some uploads to Mapillary this week, mine just arrived yesterday.

It could be a good idea to add a link to one of Gregory's Mapillary 360 cam sequences directly from the rental page, I know the video is there already. The same for the Waylens a direct link to the OpenStreetCam account, I hadn't found the account because the username was different to what was mentioned on the OSMUK page.

I'm normally a lurker and not a poster but want to contribute more to OSM this year.

I have updated https://osmuk.org/camera-rental/ to link to the osmuk-waylens user page on OpenStreetCam.

@gregorymarler do you have a link to an example output from the 360 camera?

A friend said they spotted someone in Gilesgate, Durham walking along with a 360 camera. It wasn't me, so I hoped it was someone that was using one for OpenStreetMap. Could that have been you Steven?

Here is a link to some Mapillary with 360 photos: https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=54.77604972222222&lng=-1.577295&z=17&focus=photo&panos=true&pKey=dN04pEprpFoFURrzVWz2cQ
One of the buttons in the top right of Mapillary is for filters, and you can set it to only show 360 ones then find the green lines on the map.

Although Rob is managing loan of both cameras, I have had the 360 camera for a while because nobody else has requested it. I don't use it for all my mapping, as I think it's best suited to high streets/shop-mapping.
Still, the ones about this camera are some of my most-popular videos. Our rental scheme also inspired OSM US to start their Waylens rental scheme.

I have added images (and link outs) from Mapillary and OpenStreetCam to the OSMUK rental web page.

• Jez

Yes that was me wandering around testing the camera, only 3 images actually live on Mapillary at the moment. The quality is good, but horizon wasn't perfectly level. Hoping I have fixed for the main batch. I wanted to cover somewhere well mapped on my lunch break and wouldn't matter if it didn't work. I'm hoping the quality of it is high enough to read house numbers, I think it is as well as shops.