Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River in 360 video

John Gibson, Senior Geospatial Analyst

Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River is a steep alluvial river that starts from the Tararua Ranges and enters Wellington Harbour at Petone. It flows through the mountainous terrain of the Tararua and Remutaka Ranges and merges downstream with several streams and rivers from the Eastern and Western Hutt hills. The river and its margins are a popular space accessible to a large population where people can walk, run and cycle along the river, picnic, swim and exercise their dogs.

Earlier this year the Lynker Analytics team completed a bicycle 360 (panoramic) video survey of Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River encompassing 35 km of the trail on the true left between Harcourt Park north of Upper Hutt to the river mouth in Petone.

Upper reach of Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River near Trentham

We used our established 360-video capture method described previously in our work in Whangarei and in a recent blog to document the stream margin. In this case we used a bike-mounted GoPro Max 360 panoramic camera to record 3D imagery in 2 second intervals throughout the survey.

Lower reach of Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River near Petone

The processed image data was then uploaded to Mapillary which is a free image hosting and viewing platform owned by Meta. Note any imagery uploaded to this platform is publicly shared and downloadable by anyone.

See the full Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River in 360 Video on Mapillary here.

This approach has enabled fast and efficient data capture of a large river margin in a heavily populated area as well as seamless and visually compelling representation of the space for all parties to utilise efficiently in a wider range of ways.

It requires less financial investment than traditional survey methods and generates unique and data dense insights into stream erosion, weeds, vegetation cover, aquatic ecosystems, asset condition and water quality.

Our intent with this survey and publication of a panoramic video data reference on Mapillary is to make accessible a powerful communication tool which allows residents, scientists, citizen scientists and public agencies to connect with Te Awa Kairangi/Hutt River in a new and compelling way. We plan to travel the other side of the trail this coming summer.

We also have plans to use this type of footage to train AI systems to detect asset condition, erosion hotspots, weed species and other features of interest. I encourage you to check out the viewer, navigate down the trail, pan around and plan your next adventure.