I Was a Google Mapper

Cars can’t go everywhere, so Google has invented the Trekker, a portable panoramic camera, to expand Street View’s reach.PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY SAM BAUMEL

Not long ago, the John J. Harvey, a red steel fireboat built in 1931, left the southern tip of Manhattan. It was headed north for a five-day trip up the Hudson River, as far as the Erie Canal and then back. Onboard were about fifty maritime-history buffs and a bright-green piece of hardware mounted on a backpack. This was 6138580E, one of a handful of Trekkers built by Google in the past couple of years. A Trekker is a portable photographic rig that looks like a long-necked robot with a dissected disco ball for a head. It contains two batteries, two hard drives, and fifteen cameras that point in fifteen directions, each shooting a photo every two and a half seconds. The overlapping images are spliced together into panoramas, which are then integrated into Google Maps.

Every place on Earth shows up on Google Maps, to varying degrees of detail. The oceans, for the most part, are blue blankness. Zooming in on Juba or Pyongyang yields more grain, but not much more; you can dangle the little yellow Pegman over Inhung Street for as long as you want and he will steadfastly refuse to land. Drop him onto almost any corner in the United States, however, and Google Maps will swoop into Street View: crisp curbside images, captured by a fleet of cars outfitted for the purpose.

Cars can’t go everywhere, though. They are, in fact, particularly bad at reaching many of the world’s most remarkable places. “The idea, ultimately, is to make the online experience seamless,” Deanna Yick, the program manager of Street View, told me. “It can be frustrating when you want to keep clicking forward but you’ve hit an invisible wall.” So, in 2012, Google invented the Trekker, and a team wore them while hiking through the Grand Canyon. Now, when you reach the Bright Angel Trailhead on Street View, you can keep going; if you’re not careful, you might spend an hour clicking all the way to the Colorado River, taking in the digital vistas from all angles. You won’t have hiked the trail, exactly, but you will feel oddly refreshed.

Since the Grand Canyon expedition, Google has sent Trekkers on outriggers in Malaysia to photograph the Malay Peninsula, and on snowmobiles to map ski resorts; last year, to shoot the Liwa Desert, a Trekker was strapped to a camel. It’s only a matter of time, one might imagine, before Trekkers are attached to drones. (“Nothing like that is in the works at this time,” Yick said.) Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, but first the information—panoramic imagery, in this case—must be acquired. Then the company can package it beautifully, gamifying geography. If binging on Vines feels like barhopping, the special collections on Street View feel like more wholesome clickbait.

The maritime nerds on the John J. Harvey were affiliated with two nonprofits—the Hudson River Foundation and the S.S. Columbia Project—that aim to get New Yorkers thinking about the river in new ways. They’d agreed to provide the labor if Google would supply a Trekker and handle the post-production (making the panoramas look seamless, blurring all faces and license plates for privacy). “The Hudson is such an iconic New York thing,” Yick said. “Google employees can see it from the window of our New York office, and it once formed the backbone of the city’s commerce. It seemed like a natural fit.” Most of the company’s special collections begin in a similarly symbiotic way: a nonprofit or tourism board wants a place documented, and Google wants to own the data. The images do not have an immediately evident commercial purpose, but Google is used to exploring first and asking (or, at least, answering) questions later. Google has sponsored research on speech recognition since at least 2007; these days, you can navigate your Android phone with your voice. The company might not be selling ads against its panoramic maps now, but it’s not hard to imagine a future in which access to a broad geographic database becomes a key feature of a virtual-reality headset or a self-driving car.

Last Tuesday afternoon, as the John J. Harvey made its way back to Manhattan from upstate, I took a cab to Forty-first Street and Twelfth Avenue—as far west, within Manhattan, as Street View currently goes—and then walked further west, onto Pier 81. Reporters are rarely invited to see the Trekker in action; Google-watchers usually become aware of a special collection only after it is processed and put online. The Harvey arrived, creaking against the wood moorings, and I got on. Sam Baumel, a Brooklyn-based photographer who was in charge of the Trekker, stood on the wheelhouse deck. For most of the trip, he had lashed the backpack to a bronze deck pipe; but the pipe had bent and snapped somewhere near Sleepy Hollow, twenty-five miles to the north. Now Baumel stood with the Trekker on his back, striking a king-of-the-world pose.

We continued south—past private heliports, past the golfers on Chelsea Piers, past Google’s New York headquarters. I stood on the prow with Ian Danic, a software entrepreneur and old-boat enthusiast, who wore a bucket hat and a big beard. Gesturing toward the Freedom Tower, he said, “When we left, it was so foggy that you couldn’t see the top.” Now the tower was doing the very pretty thing it does in late-afternoon sunlight, the colossal frame appearing to warm and soften and nearly disappear. “Nice,” Danic said. It had been determined that, as long as we were documenting the Hudson, we were not going to skip the Statue of Liberty. (As of now, Pegman can alight on Liberty Island, but not on the water nearby; the views of Lady Liberty are from unflattering, neck-craningly close angles.) “We’ll have to see whether they blur her face when they put her on Street View,” Danic said.

Beers were passed around. Baumel, above us, said “Cheers” in a forlorn way, so I climbed a ladder to bring him one. He had been in the same stance, legs wide to prevent sway, for hours. The backpack weighed forty pounds, and it was top-heavy. I asked how he was holding up. “I feel glad to be part of cartographic history,” he said. The words were slogan-ish, but he sounded sincere. “I have a huge map of the world on my bathroom wall. I’m into this stuff.”

I offered to relieve him. Technically, he was the only certified Trekker photographer onboard—he had spent several days completing webinars—but so long as the equipment was working its operating instructions were simple: stand still. Baumel removed from his pocket an Android phone that had been modified to operate the Trekker. He checked the time and the G.P.S. coordinates, pressed pause, helped me put on the backpack, and started recording again.

We left the Statue and headed north. The Trekker kept shooting, capturing Manhattan’s western coast in sunlight. I felt myself straddling two times. What was happening now—what I was seeing, and what the fifteen eyes above my head were seeing—would, someday soon, become the eternal present. I was crossing by ferry, considering future commuters. I was the glass surface of the Tower, glimmering in and out of view. Later this summer, when the Hudson River special collection is added to Google Maps, online adventurers, clicking upstream, might see two runners on the Greenway, thirty feet apart, who look uncannily similar—neon-green tank tops, wraparound sunglasses. This is no software glitch; there really were two runners. Yes, the woman on Pier 45 appears to be Irish step dancing. The light just before sunset was golden, and there was a warm breeze from the west.

“How do you feel?” Baumel said.

The answer: glad to be part of cartographic history.