Latest news with #McCallen
The Star
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- The Star
Inside a Google Street View car: A celebrity on wheels
NEW YORK: The online job posting was cryptic. A driver was needed, that much Joe McCallen knew. The mission? That was secret. When he stepped inside the tricked out Honda HR-V – outfitted with a 9-foot turret on the roof, a customiSed screen covering the centre console and a back seat filled with computers – McCallen realised he was helping Google map every corner of the world. In his Google Street View car, McCallen has driven 100,000 miles in three years, patrolling Midwest and East Coast roads. He drives from just after sunrise to just before sunset, while cameras on the roof take photos that get spliced together into panoramic images. Because of him and countless other drivers, anyone in the world can log onto Google Maps and travel virtually along 12 million miles of roads in 110 countries. It's the closest thing humans have to teleportation. 'I love doing it,' McCallen, 63, of Tampa Bay, Florida, said. 'The places you go to, the people you see. Stuff you just can't write.' Driving a custom Honda HR-V with a nine-foot camera turret, McCallen is accustomed to being cheered or treated like a minor celebrity by pedestrians on his sunrise-to-sunset shifts. — GRAHAM DICKIE/The New York Times When he accepted a lucrative severance package from an asset management role in his 50s, he took a couple years off. Then he tried out a few other finance jobs. But he wanted to do something completely different. Driving for Google, he has stopped for moose, seen an unexpected showing of the Northern Lights in Maine and struck up deep conversations with strangers at rural diners. On a Friday morning in March, McCallen let a reporter tag along for a ride through a 30-block area in New York's West Village. Nearly every pedestrian who walked by took photos, waved, pointed or nodded at the car like they had just seen a minor celebrity. (Not Justin Bieber or Rihanna level. More similar to that time I saw Josh Hutcherson in the Financial District; an 'isn't that that guy from that thing?' double take.) The first Street View model, which launched in 2007, was cobbled together into a bulky black top hat-like fixture and strapped onto a van and driven around Mountain View, California. Engineers fixed bugs and solved hardware errors with makeshift fixes straight out of the television show Silicon Valley. To prevent condensation from building up in the cameras, drivers covered their cameras with socks at night, said Ethan Russell, a senior director of Google Maps. Some drivers forgot to take the socks off the next morning and traveled for hours with the camera only capturing a cotton-polyester blend. Pedestrians wave to a Google Street View custom Honda HR-V on the roads of Manhattan on March 14, 2025. — GRAHAM DICKIE/The New York Times Eighteen years later, Street View is no longer relying on socks. Planes with Google's cameras on the bottom are flying overhead. Satellites assist. People are able to submit their own images to Street View, essentially turning anyone with a smartphone into a Street View driver. Street View cameras have captured Machu Picchu, the Great Barrier Reef and Antarctica. A Google Street View car in Palo Alto, Calif. on March 11, 2025. Google's sleek new camera model will allow any car with a roof rack to become a Street View car. — GRAHAM DICKIE/The New York Times Google's sleek new camera model will allow any car with a roof rack to become a Street View car. The cars will no longer need to be transported overseas. Looking to the future, Russell and his team are focused on expanding Street View's capabilities with artificial intelligence, which has long helped blur faces, license plates and addresses on the platform. Soon, information from a business' storefront (such as its hours or its phone number) could be gleaned from Street View images and then appear in search engine results. There are a couple drawbacks to the experience. Street View has faced privacy concerns. Drivers constantly stress about overpasses that threaten to clip the 9-foot-tall ostrich neck on their roof; Arrested Development got that right. And McCallen gets flipped off a lot. On that warm Friday morning, McCallen dropped us off by the sidewalk and sped off to map his designated 30 blocks of the West Village. After that, he would drive back down to Florida to continue his quest to map the world. McCallen plans to sign up for another year working for Street View. 'For now, it's perfect,' he said. 'I'm flexible, and so I just go with the flow.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Belfast Telegraph
11-05-2025
- Automotive
- Belfast Telegraph
Michael Dunlop has everything he needs to continue leading way, insists Phillip McCallen
Dunlop ended a nine-year wait for victory at the Triangle road race on Thursday, clinching a Supersport and Superstock double. The Ballymoney man then added a Superbike success on Saturday to complete a terrific treble, giving him eight career wins at Ireland's premier motorcycle race. It was Dunlop's first Superbike success around the 8.9-mile course since 2016 when he triumphed on a Hawk Racing BMW. Now riding BMW machinery for the first time since the Armoy Race of Legends national meeting in 2021, Dunlop put himself back on the top step on Saturday, much to the delight of his thousands of sun-drenched fans. It has been an impressive start to 2025 for Dunlop, who was a double winner at the Cookstown 100 in April in the Supersport and Superbike classes as he warmed up for the major road races. Dunlop will now be looking ahead to the Isle of Man TT where he became the most successful rider in history at the legendary event in 2024, winning four times to set a new benchmark of 29 victories. He has changed his stable of machinery for 2025, switching from Honda to BMW for the Superbike and Superstock classes and changing from a Yamaha R6 to a Ducati Panigale V2 Supersport machine. Dunlop is set to continue riding an Italian Paton in the Supertwin races at the TT where he won both races in the summer of 2024 plus both Supersport events to break his legendary uncle Joey's record of 26 wins around the infamous Mountain Course. With long-time backers Stuart and Steve Hicken of Hawk Racing continuing to support Dunlop in 2025 and his close-knit MD Racing team behind him – headed by loyal sponsor and right-hand man Gary Ryan – McCallen says the road racing superstar is in his strongest position for years with the TT only weeks away. 'It's the team and the backup,' said McCallen, who is an 11-time TT winner. 'For the last few years, it's looked like he's had his bikes at the last minute or he's come here still building bikes and doing different things and he's not really ready. 'This year, he's been racing, he's done an endurance race (at Le Mans), he's done other races this year, and I know these are new bikes but the teams are really, really good. 'He's got the same teams as he's had for years and he's totally confident with those people because there is a big worry of 'who is working on my bikes and what are they doing with it'. 'So, he's happy with his teams and he knows he's got good bikes. 'That Ducati, apparently there is no higher-spec Ducati in Europe than that; his BMW Superbike, allegedly – and it looks like it – there's no higher-spec than that in the country as well. 'His production bike is definitely good and the Hawk boys, the team that he is so, so happy with, they have built him TT and North West-winning bikes, although more so at the TT. 'He's happy with them, and in my mind, if I had that Ducati, I'd be happy; if I had those BMWs with that spec, I'd be happy as well. 'I think that's all showing now, and lots of other years he hasn't had the miles he's wanted. 'He has come here (North West 200) with maybe a few race miles done, but this year, he has come mentally prepared, he's definitely physically prepared and he's mechanically prepared, so why would you not be happy?' Carrickfergus rider Alastair Seeley was unable to achieve a milestone 30th win at the North West on his return to the event after a year's absence, however Dunlop is on the cusp of reaching that remarkable landmark at the TT. On current form, it appears to be a matter of when, not if.
