I was planning for the 36 photo walk on March 23, 2019, as a part of @PaulPavlinovich 36 Walk and I went through the Google Map and the Street View images of the Sigiriya. I was amazed; the street view imagery near the Sigiriya World Heritage site was not available. I wanted to do something about this as this area is one of the most famous tourist attractions in Sri Lanka among local and foreign tourists. Because of this thought, the first blue line meetup in Sri Lanka was created.
If you want to get an idea about the Sigiriya, have a look at this Google Photo album from the 36 Walk Sigirya-LK.
A final year archaeology student from the University of Kelaniya wanted to participate, and we went to the Sigiriya on March 21, 2019, as we should start the meetup around 10.00 am. We stayed in a hotel and in the morning, we added a few 360 photos of the hotel to the Street View. Then we planned our route to cover the missing Street View imagery. The hotel owner asked what we are doing and when we explained what we are going to do he was delighted and said it would help the businesses around the Sigiriya area.
Me and Rumal getting ready for the meetup…
Then around 9.55 am we went to the starting point of the meetup. There were two of us, and we start the meetup exactly at 10 in the morning. Then we moved towards the Sigiriya and covered the roads around Sigiriya.
We wanted to cover the road around Lion’s rock. We contacted a project officer at the Central Cultural Fund of Sri Lanka, and we got permission from the project manager to capture the street view imagery inside the Sigiriya site. Our special thank should go to the CCF and the project manager at the site for allowing us to capture the street view imagery, which will help the millions of tourists.
After capturing these videos, the Ricoh Theta V was full of videos, and the battery was almost dead. We decided to take a break to download the video and charge the camera.
Then in the afternoon we again start the capturing and first, we covered the hotel road. Then we covered the road with most of the home-stays and hotels. Some roads were under construction, and they were closed. We could not capture the video on those roads. We would capture them during our next meetup in Sigiriya.
Some roads were under construction
Then we had a cup of Beli(Indian bael, Aegle marmelos) Mal Drink at the native food staff in Sigiriya.
Having Beli Mal Drink…
We covered almost 20 km of street view imagery and we were happy as we can help millions to find directions and first-hand information about the Sigiriya before they visit the site. The total size of the captured videos was over 40 GB, and it would take a few days to upload to the Street View. @SonyaN @ArmonJ Is there a way to send the street view imagery to Google on a pen drive? Where they can upload it to the Street View. Otherwise, it will take days to upload these videos.
Here is the before and after map of Sigiriya World Heritage site and nearby roads. You can see the difference for yourself. After the map, some blue lines are still not rendered it will take a few hours or days to render. Anyway, these two images will give you an idea about the contribution to the Street View from this meetup.
Before the meetup
After the meetup (about two-thirds of the videos rendered)
Enjoy the recap video of the meetup.
Here is the link to the shared Google Photo Album of the meetup.
A special thanks should go to Rumal Vindula for participating in this meetup.
@sithara_mahalekam @ErmesT @KarenVChin @ShafiulB @VasT @DeniGu @YK1001 Hope all of you will enjoy this.
