Google's spent millions of dollars sending its Street View cars around the world, photographing streets so you can see them on the internet. And now you can replicate this for some reason.

Created for a class at West Point, Roy D. Ragsdale created his prototype setup using a laptop, $300 of off-the-shelf components and open source software. As he drives it around, it captures eight 1280x1024 jpegs that are then stitched together and uploaded to Google Earth.

It's certainly impressive, and I can see how one could want to make Street-View-like images of private property. But for most of us, I think letting Google do the heavy lifting is working out just fine. [IEEE Spectrum via Make]

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