Building a community powered map of the world

[thechaingamer.eth]

Hi All,

My name is Ali, and I'm an advisor for NVG8. Hope you're all having a great week.

I wanted to share a project I'm involved in that I think many of you might find interesting. It's called nvg8.io, and it's a community-powered map of the world. ️

Imagine a decentralized, frequently refreshed alternative to Google Maps, where the community comes together to build and maintain the most accurate and up-to-date map possible. That's what we're aiming for at nvg8.io!

Here's a quick rundown of how it works:

1. Contributors like you use your dashcam or smartphone to capture and share geospatial data, such as road layouts, points of interest, or traffic updates.
2. Our platform processes and integrates the data into a continuously evolving map. The more contributions we receive, the more accurate and complete our map becomes.
3. As a thank you for your contributions, you'll earn NVG8 tokens that can be redeemed for gift cards (coming soon) or held onto until they are listed on crypto exchanges in the near future.

Our goal is to create a map that's not only more accurate but also more accountable, transparent, and community focused. We believe that, with the help of the dashcam community, we can achieve this.

But we can't do this without your help! So, if you're as excited about the idea as we are, we invite you to join us on our journey.

Please note, there is nothing to buy, you could take existing dashcam footage you have or new dashcam footage you record and contribute it to the platform.

We are continually supporting more dashcams and the only hard requirements are the following:
Videos contributed to Navigate Maps must meet the following requirements:

• • 1080p and 1440p
    • • 4K resolution or better is recommended
  • Minimum 30 frames per second (fps)
  • Included GPS track with timestamps
    • • Most mobile phones have built-in GPS and can record GPS tracks via third-party applications. For example, using an app like OsmAnd Maps and Navigation, a free application available on both iOS and Android, would provides functionality to record GPS tracks to GPX files. Please note that if you are using a smartphone, you would likely need a supplemental third-party app to capture the GPS requirements.
  • Minimal blurriness and vibration in the video

The following video file formats are supported:

• • .mp4
  • .avi
  • .tavi
  • .mov
  • .mkv
  • .360

Videos must include a GPS track either embedded in the video file or provided separately as a .gpx, .nmea, .csv, .txt, .srt file.

You can find more information on our website at nvg8.io, hop into our discord (https://discord.gg/QRXdavxKxk), or feel free to ask any questions here on the forum.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

 

[lacibaci]

So you want us to build your businesses by providing high quality detailed videos for free?

 

[thechaingamer.eth]

So you want us to build your businesses by providing high quality detailed videos for free?

Hi lacibaci,

Not for free.

As I mentioned in my post, you'll earn NVG8 tokens (1 billion fixed supply) that can:

1. be redeemed for gift cards (coming soon) or
2. held onto until they are listed on crypto exchanges in the near future and then traded

The idea behind NVG8 is to create an ecosystem with NVG8 token holders benefiting from the success of the platform.

You can find all the information about token rewards at https://docs.nvg8.io

 

[Vortex Radar]

Why not pay people on Bitcoin over Lightning instead of coming up with yet another token? Most ****coins aren’t necessary and ultimately fail.

 

[thechaingamer.eth]

Why not pay people on Bitcoin over Lightning instead of coming up with yet another token? Most ****coins aren’t necessary and ultimately fail.

That’s a great question. It’s ultimately a capital constraint problem & being able to create a sustainable ecosystem.

The NVG8 token is linked to the success of the entire Navigate ecosystem - which includes sourcing data, rewarding contributors for that data & providing apps & services powered by that data!

So if the things highlighted above happen, the Navigate Foundation + community members all benefit from being owners of the ecosystem by holding the NVG8 token.

The reason for not using USD (BTC & ETH) is the amount of capital it would take to collect all the dashcam + aerial imagery would be too great. After all, that is not something even Google or Apple are trying to do.

I do understand the skepticism, it’s an ambitious project with pretty lofty goals, but we’re pretty optimistic about the value this can create for the NVG8 community & the rest of the world. It’s also not something that an individual or small group of people would be able to do based on the scale of the problem.

By crowdsourcing imagery from everywhere and rewarding folks for each upload, we can completely change how maps are created and used! I appreciate you asking the question. If you have other questions, please let me know or hop into our discord.

 

[Vortex Radar]

Why wouldn’t people just use something like Waze which is also reliant on crowdsourced data? Why reinvent the wheel here? Is there some specific benefit that existing maps don’t provide? They seem to do great with things like temporary road closures, for example.

It sounds like a pretty expensive project in terms of bandwidth to download footage, storage, video processing and analysis, etc.

Based on your explanation, it sounds like you’re wanting to effectively give out equity saying you don’t have any money now, but here’s a token instead that’s effectively worthless at the time being, but maybe hopefully one day it’ll be worth something and hopefully one day you’ll be able to sell it if an exchange lists it and hopefully there’s enough liquidity and desire for the token that it doesn’t instantly drop to zero when everyone sells.

The whole thing just doesn’t make sense, but I could be totally wrong of course.

 

[zagsbbfan]

Sounds like a lot of it would be re-inventing the wheel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

 

[thechaingamer.eth]

Why wouldn’t people just use something like Waze which is also reliant on crowdsourced data? Why reinvent the wheel here? Is there some specific benefit that existing maps don’t provide? They seem to do great with things like temporary road closures, for example.

It sounds like a pretty expensive project in terms of bandwidth to download footage, storage, video processing and analysis, etc.

Based on your explanation, it sounds like you’re wanting to effectively give out equity saying you don’t have any money now, but here’s a token instead that’s effectively worthless at the time being, but maybe hopefully one day it’ll be worth something and hopefully one day you’ll be able to sell it if an exchange lists it and hopefully there’s enough liquidity and desire for the token that it doesn’t instantly drop to zero when everyone sells.

The whole thing just doesn’t make sense, but I could be totally wrong of course.

I’m glad you brought up Waze. The Waze model was essentially using crowdsourced data (for free) and using that to build the app. They ultimately got acquired by Google for 1.3B. The people who contribute to Waze didn’t get anything.

The technical challenges re. processing this data are not very hard to solve, because hardware is quite cheap now. We’ve already built out an MVP that is available on https://maps.nvg8.io - there are projects like OSM (like zagsbbfan mentioned just below your post) & OAM which are made possible by people uploading data for free.

The tokenization of the project is primarily to create an incentive for people as opposed to asking everyone to give their data for free.

The goal of navigate isn’t to create a new map app, it is to collect high resolution drone & dashcam imagery at a large scale, and then create apps on top of that data & allow developers to use that dataset to create their own apps! The “frequently refreshed” piece is also key, because you will able to gain interesting insights observing the same area over time - example would be “average traffic at a McDonalds near your office at 2pm”. It might be worth your time to drive to one that is slightly further away but has a shorter drive thru line.

I do agree with you that it’s an ambitious project, but I don’t think there are quite as many hopefullys as you mentioned - we’ve put together an initial tokenomics plan in place and this will be one that evolves as we get feedback from our community.

Ultimately, I guess the way I see it is this, lots of folks already give their data for free to projects or large companies with little to no personal upside potential. Here’s something that is ambitious but also attempts to reward the community members who make it possible. We’ll be making a bunch of improvements to maps.nvg8, adding more features and keep adding data, and that’ll hopefully show folks enough value to get them to join us!

Appreciate your questions.