Google hires a camel to gather street view data of the desert
Digital Reporter
Friday, October 10, 2014, 2:41 PM -
Google is known for its cutting edge technology, but the company took a simplistic approach when gathering "street view" data of the Liwa Oasis, a large expanse of desert in the Abu Dhabi desert.
Enter Raffia the camel.
The animal was hired by the company to carry Google's Trekker camera, a gadget that's normally strapped to humans to capture street view data of areas that the company's Street View cars can't navigate.
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Raffia has become the first animal to carry the Trekker camera.
"With every environment and every location, we try to customize the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment," Google spokesperson Monica Baz told The National newspaper.
"In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way."
Check out a video of the process here:
