Adam Johnson of St. Paul spent part of his summer schlepping around a 40-pound backpack with what looks like a disco ball perched atop it.
Johnson, who works for the city’s convention and visitors bureau, was on a high-tech mission to visually document for digital posterity many of St. Paul’s off-road marvels. To accomplish this, he wore on his back a tricked-out photography apparatus called the Google Trekker.
That bright-green ball positioned high above his head? It has 15 cameras pointing every which way, which allowed Johnson to photograph the St. Paul area as never before.
“It was an interesting adventure,” he said.
Google, the Silicon Valley-based tech giant, has been lending out Trekker photo backpacks to tourism bureaus, universities, nonprofits and other groups around the country. The Trekker loan program recently marked its third anniversary.
It is a part of the company’s longtime crusade to map and photograph more and more of the Earth’s surface.
Street View, a feature of the Google Maps service, is a well-known part of this quest. Those looking up locations on Google Maps can click through an endless series of overlapping 360-degree panoramas that simulate what it’s like to travel down roadways.
But Google’s vast fleet of Street View cars, which roam neighborhoods around the world while taking pictures in all directions, are not designed to go off-road. So, in 2012, Google came up with the Trekker unit, initially intended for use by staffers, to carry onto hiking trails, ski slopes and other places autos cannot go.
Notable places that have been photo-documented include the Grand Canyon,
the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Galapagos Islands, pedestrian paths of Venice, the Egyptian pyramids, the Colorado River rapids, the Canadian Arctic, Mount Fuji, the Eiffel Tower and the world’s tallest building, known as the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai.
In another Minnesota-related Google Trekker development, Turner Sports recently shot 360-degree panoramas at Ryder Cup locale Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska.
All of these places, once they’re Trekker-documented, can be navigated on the web just like roads in Street View.
FINDING ST. PAUL
Google recently offered a Trekker on brief loan to St. Paul’s tourism bureau, known as Visit St. Paul. Johnson said his imagination caught fire. He had to have one.
After Google shipped the equipment to Visit St. Paul, Johnson and several of his colleagues spent weeks painstakingly traversing several dozen St. Paul locations as the Trekker cameras automatically took photos by the thousands.
Places ranged from the small (the gardens in front of the downtown St. Paul Hotel) to the vast (the State Capitol grounds, Fort Snelling, the city’s three golf courses, the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, Como Zoo and others). They even navigated a St. Paul segment of the Mississippi River, with the Trekker securely ensconced at a pontoon boat’s bow. There were nearly two dozen locales, in all.
The tourism staffers ultimately shot 4,500 “panoramics,” which are sets of photos shot by the Trekker at a single spot. These got stored on a series of hard drives, which the St. Paul shooters kept swapping out as each filled up. They controlled the rig with a Google-supplied handset connected to the camera backpack via Bluetooth.
As the operator walked, the ball cameras took photos every 2.5 seconds. The sphere extends two feet above a user’s head, giving its cameras unobstructed views of their surroundings. The Trekker can run about six to eight hours on a full battery charge.
Johnson said he lost track of “how many people came up to us and asked if we were playing Pokemon Go.”
Hauling the photo rig was hard work.
“It got heavy, Johnson said. ”We were joking when packing up the Trekker that it smelled like shoulder pads from a football practice. We donated a fair amount of sweat to the (Google) cause.”
The team didn’t have to pay for the Trekker. In fact, Google paid them $500 to cover the cost of meals, permits and other incidentals, Johnson said.
As of Friday, Johnson and his colleagues hadn’t seen the visual results of their arduous journeys. The panoramics on the hard drive, once shipped back to the Googleplex, were to be “stitched” together into the Street View-like panoramas.
Once these are posted publicly, Visit St. Paul intends to emulate the state of Michigan and its Google Trekker site, which they said is a first-rate addition to the Pure Michigan tourism site.
For Visit St. Paul, the off-road panoramas will be a great way to entice potential visitors into sealing the deal. “It’s one more way to view St. Paul, to see St. Paul in a cool way,” Johnson said.
Boston, Philadelphia, Austin, Texas, Dayton, Ohio, Spokane, Wash., Columbus, Ind., and backcountry portions of Nevada, Alberta and Saskkatchewan are other locations recently immortalized by Google Trekker photography.
“Local organizations and individuals know their communities and trails better than we do,” said Google spokeswoman Mara Harris, explaining why the Trekker loan program came to be.
“By enabling others to take charge and collect Street View imagery of their hometowns, parks and trails, they are able to capture the things that are unique about their communities,” Harris said.
This fits in nicely with Google’s overall mapping mission, she said.
“The more we can enable people to contribute to the (world’s) map, the more comprehensive, useful and up to date it will be.”
