Mapillary is a new project to allow people to collect street view like images easily with their smartphone or other camera. It means that if you want to have street view images of some cycle path or footpath you can easily add it, unlike with Google’s street view.
To make it easier to collect the images on my Brompton I have made a little holder for my phone using some custom cut denim sewn together, adding some buttons and button holes. Adding the trim around the hole for the camera, and a section of fabric to keep the camera out front, were required otherwise the denim was fraying and causing single strands, or a big chunk of fabric, to get into the image. I’ve added a piece of pipe insulation to help cushion and steady the movement of the phone, otherwise the phone moves too much and generates too many blurry images. It now seems to be at the stage where it’s pretty reliable.
I unfortunately don’t have a good view of the screen thus can’t easily tell if it’s working. Here’s some photos of the holder:
My brother gave me a proper plastic iphone holder for my bike. Annoyingly the wifi is broken on my iPhone so I can’t use Mapillary. I need a new phone again. But I was able to shoot video from the handlebars. That works quite well.