A little Friday fun here as we share the latest from the Google Street View team… camel view!
10-year-old Raffia brings you a camel’s-eye view of the Liwa Desert. (Courtesy Google)
This from Fox News 13… It’s given us robot cars and internet-enabled glasses — but when it came to creating a “Street View” of a desert, Google hit on a low-tech solution. It hired a camel.
The beast has become the first animal to carry Google’s Trekker camera, which is typically hoisted by humans to capture 360-degree images of destinations inaccessible to its Street View cars.
Google spokeswoman Monica Baz says the camel, reportedly named Raffia, was an apt way of documenting the beautiful shifting sands of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis.
“With every environment and every location, we try to customize the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment,” she told The National newspaper.
The Trekkers are usually loaned out and attached to humans. But a 10-year-old camel named Raffia just won the honor of being the first four-legged creature to add to Street View’s contributor roster.
Raffia and a guide walked through the Liwa Desert, a 100-kilometer-wide stretch of desert to the south west of the city of Abu Dhabi.
You can apply to be a Trekker too if you have a camel or other clever means of transport!