Just walk, and today's streets become open data.
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.
Wear it. Walk.
That's all.
Nothing to do while walking. Your walk becomes the record.
Wear it
Put on smart glasses and tap Start. The Android version also includes a phone-camera mode.
Walk
Your usual stroll or commute. Photos at intervals of at least 5 meters, with location and capture time. The interval widens when GPS is less accurate.
It becomes city data
Images are sent automatically after you stop. After processing on Mapillary, they are published as open street-level imagery.
Why walking
is a contribution
A photo of a street starts aging the moment it is 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 and upload are all automatic. You just walk. Published under an open license (CC BY-SA 4.0), the images go on to support map making, urban planning, research and AI that reads the city.
Reading and capturing
close the loop.
Michiutsushi is the sister project of michiyomi, the street verbalization data. michiyomi uses AI to put citizen-captured street photos into words, so anyone can look up how 2,131,330 photos of Tokyo read (release 2026-10-09-r2). It also reads how streets change by comparing photos of the same place from different years.
But it can only read the city up to the year it was photographed. If no one photographs Tokyo this year, there will be no change to read next year. Michiutsushi is the intake that brings the present into that foundation.
Built so you can
walk with confidence
These photos go public, so four rules are built in from the start.
Faces and plates blurred automatically
Mapillary automatically blurs faces and license plates. Missed areas can be submitted for additional blurring.
Capture status stays visible
Rokid shows capture status in its display. Ray-Ban Meta uses the app status and the capture LED on the glasses.
Shoots only with a good position fix
Capture pauses when location readings are stale or inaccurate. Positions still carry measurement error.
Public streets only
Explicit, publication-purpose capture of streetscapes from public roads. Not for private property or event venues.
Planned devices
Two smart-glass models plus a phone-only mode, all on the same pipeline.
Rokid Glasses
Captures through the glasses camera, with capture status at the edge of your view, paired with your phone. A phone-only mode (landscape recommended) ships in the same app.
Ray-Ban Meta
An iOS version for Ray-Ban Meta is also in development. The app must stay on screen during capture. Portrait framing and image quality are still being checked on real devices.