For over a year, Jeffrey Yoo Warren, a fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been messing around with kites, balloons and cameras. The goal is to come up with tools that can be used to take aerial photos without the use of expensive equipment.
Now the project, known as Grassroots Mapping, is recording the devastating effects of the gulf oil spill using cameras attached to kites. They say these photos can then be used to assess and respond to the damage and to support possible “litigation following the spill.”
The group’s website provides full access to the maps they have generated, with all imagery in the public domain, as well as a materials list for building your own kite-camera.
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