If you are looking to efficiently collect coverage with high-quality imagery, you might want to try out a rig setup with multiple action cameras. This is a good way to imitate 360° capture but with a more reasonable price for the same quality.

The Mapillary viewer features what we call "combined panning", which lets you pan between overlapping regular images (such as those captured with a camera rig) just like you would do with a full panorama, simply by dragging with your mouse. Try it out in the example below:

Note that you can also opt for a setup with less than four cameras. For example, you could have just two cameras, one facing forward and one to the side of the street, and drive the same route back and forth to cover all four directions. If you’re unlikely to drive the same road/street again any time soon then you might want to opt for forwards and backward view instead (this applies to cycling as well).

How-To: Setting up the 'Multiple Sony' action cam rig

This rig was first introduced by Bryan Housel from Mapbox who used it to collect really great coverage of e.g. San Francisco. You can read his blog post for more details and background on this setup, if you'd like.

✅Checklist

🚗Setting the rig up

Attach the cameras to the car roof with sturdy suction cup mounts and face them front, back, left, and right. The best placement is high up on your vehicle, aimed as level as possible to the horizon and tilted slightly upwards to avoid including your vehicle in the frame.

It’s good if your suction cup mounts enable you to lift the camera up a bit, as well as attach extra equipment. That is both to get a better view and because the camera’s own battery doesn’t last long so you need extra power, and power banks can be more convenient than cables that extend to your car charger socket. Use some sort of small waterproof pouch, e.g. a knife sheath, to hold the power bank, and connect it to the camera via a short cable.

You can control the cameras wirelessly with the Live remote view wrist wrap.

📸Capture tips

When capturing street-level images, more is better. Ideally, you set the cameras to record at 1-second intervals. Make sure you have large enough memory cards in the cameras.

When you’re done capturing, just copy the images to your computer and use the Desktop Uploader to upload them to Mapillary.