MICHIUTSUSHI — 道写し / "capture the streets" —
Put on smart glasses and take your usual walk. That alone turns the streets you see into open data anyone in the world can use. Michiutsushi, a street-imagery contribution app, is now in development.
Zero interaction — your walk becomes the record.
Put on smart glasses and tap Start. No glasses? A phone in your chest pocket works too.
Your usual stroll or commute. One photo every 5 meters, captured automatically with precise position and heading.
Images are automatically published to Mapillary as open street-level imagery anyone can use.
Street imagery is a public good behind maps, disaster planning, accessibility surveys, and AI.
A photo of a street starts aging the moment it's taken. New shops open, construction begins, sidewalks change. But the city inside the data stays frozen — until someone walks the street and photographs it again.
Michiutsushi turns that "someone" from a specialized survey crew into anyone out for a walk. Capture, geotagging, upload — all automatic. You just walk.
Published under an open license (CC BY-SA), your images keep working long after your walk — in map making, urban planning, research, and AI that reads the city — in places you'll never even know about.
Michiutsushi is the sister project of michiyomi, the street verbalization platform.
michiyomi uses AI to verbalize citizen-captured street imagery — 830,000 points across Tokyo's 23 wards, searchable by anyone. It even reads how streets change by comparing images of the same spot across different years.
But it can only read the city up to the year it was photographed. If no one photographs this year's Tokyo, next year there will be no "change" to read. Michiutsushi is the intake that supplies the present.
walk → capture → publish → read → walk again ↻
Visit michiyomi ↗These photos go public — so four disciplines are built in from the start.
Before publication, Mapillary automatically blurs any faces and license plates that appear in the images.
While capturing, the glasses show a recording indicator in the display. This will never be a covert camera.
Capture pauses while GPS accuracy is poor, so images with broken locations never enter the public data.
Explicit, publication-purpose capture of streetscapes from public roads. Not for private property or event venues.
Two smart-glass models plus phone-only mode, all on the same pipeline.
Captures through the glasses camera with a recording indicator at the edge of your view, paired with your phone. A phone-only mode (chest-pocket carry) ships in the same app.
An iOS version for Ray-Ban Meta glasses is in development in parallel. The experience is the same: wear it and walk.
Michiutsushi is in development. Release news will appear on this page and on michiyomi.dev.
COMING SOON — 2026