If you have a love of outdoors, are extremely athletic and it is your career ambition to one day work for Google, then this is definitely your dream job.
Street View on Google Maps is one of the many services the online search engine provides and allows you to take a virtual tour of almost anything in the world, from Times Square in New York to your very own street – all from the comfort of your own home.
But for those places that were too difficult to access with the Google Street Car, a member of the team came up with a new and more energetic way to ensure everything was covered.
Dan Ratner wrote in one of Google’s official blogs in 2009: “I first started thinking about this question around two years ago. My day job is working as a mechanical engineer on the Street View team, but I do a lot of mountain biking in my spare time. One day, while exploring some roads less travelled, I realised that I could combine these two pursuits and build a bicycle-based camera system for Street View. The result? The Street View trike.”
The trike is a human-powered bike which has a generator and a pole of nine cameras attached to it. Since then the trike has been in all sorts of unusual places such as LEGOLAND California and even asked members of the public to vote for places for them to go – Stonehenge and Warwick Castle were the two most popular voted for.
It is a job that not everyone can do however. As the nine-foot trike weighs about 250 pounds, the company tends to hire athletes. But there are still opportunities to experience it.
If you’re a tourism board, non-profit, university, research organisation or other third party who can gain access and help collect imagery of hard to reach places, you can apply to borrow the trike and help map the world.
Tell us your dream job and we’ll tell you how to get it. Contact cheryl.livingstone@ajl.co.uk