Following A Stolen iPhone’s Path in Google’s Getaway Car

This video follows a stealer ’s movements , using the data from the filch iPhone itself .

Sue Huang ’s sound was steal , and she go back it five days later , ransoming it from the thief who took it . But the tale does n’t end there . She and Brian House usedOpenPathsand Google Street View images to revive the sound bm in video recording . As Brian explain on his blog :

We had a assembling of points that the stealer had visited with the phone , so I recall we should be able to get a smooth itinerary between them .

First , I used the Google Directions API to map the likely route that the thief would have admit between known fix , as well as occupy in some intermediary points , which was @blprnt ’s idea from our earlier brainstorms . One of the cool things about the Street View vista data ( described by @jaimethompson ) is that it usher the linkage between sequential images taken by the Google car . So by calculating the gallery from one power point to the next and heuristically take links between panoramas manoeuvre in the right direction , we can access all the image aim along the way . Again using head we can point the camera in the right direction , download the tiles we want , and sew a frame together .

Brian says it ’s sort of like Google is drive the pickup car . I prefer to think of it as the following vehicle .

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