Soon, you’ll no longer need to leave your office chair to enjoy the sand and waves at the many urban beaches in the Boston area.
Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, a non-profit organization, has teamed up with Google to take 360-degree images of several local beaches to be included on the Internet behemoth’s “Street View” maps.
Call it Google beach view.
“It’s a win-win situation for both of us, and increases the visibility of the resources we care about the most while generating some content for them at the same time,” said Save the Harbor spokesman, Bruce Berman.
Google delivered one of its unique “Trekker” cameras, a device that looks like a backpack and features an orb of 15 sophisticated lenses at the top, to Save the Harbor’s offices this week. The Trekker is capable of capturing detailed panoramic portraits of a given area, which are then stitched together and put online for public view.
Last year, Google loaned one of the bulbous cameras to the Charles River Conservancy, to document the water body from the Watertown Dam to the Boston Harbor.
Interns working at Save the Harbor this summer will strap on the Trekker, which weighs around 40 pounds, and hit the beaches. They plan to scan and explore the seashores of Lynn, Nahant, Revere, Winthrop, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester, Quincy, and Hull, according to Berman. They will also check out Treasure Beach on Spectacle Island.
“One of them is so enthusiastic about it, we may have to wrestle it away from her,” Berman said.
The first step of the project will require a walk-through of the beaches they will take pictures of, so the organization can get a feel for what areas should be included in the mapping process.
“We are going to be innovative,” Berman said, adding that they plan to walk along the sandy shorelines at different times of the day, to collect snapshots of the beaches when they’re crowded and empty. “People should expect to see them out and about.”
Save the Harbor will notify communities ahead of time before scoping out a location.
The organization hopes by sharing the pictures with a broader audience, it will pique peoples’ interest in visiting the areas.
“By using this unified visual approach, and using the technology that has been made available to us, we think people who might never come to the beaches will become interested in them,” he said. “We want people out on the beaches, but we also want to show them off.”
The project will wrap up sometime in August, with the images available online later this year.
Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear.