The next time you hit the trail, keep an eye out for a very unusual looking backpack. Luc Vincent, an engineer at Google, has built a 30 lb. backpack dubbed the ‘Street View Trekker’ that will be used for Google Maps and Google Street View going off road and down the trail.

The ‘Trekker’ was introduced today by the Google Maps team as part of their “Next Dimension” press event. It weighs roughly 30 lbs the pack hoists the spherical camera housing above the hiker’s head, to avoid the hiker’s head.

Don’t expect to see this pack for sale at your local outdoors store, it’s not a consumer product, but rather a tool in Google’s arsenal for capturing and sharing the world around us in a digital fashion.

Perhaps the exciting idea I take away from this is that there might be teams hired by Google tasked with hiking some of the world’s most famous trails, collecting photos as they go, to archive the trail in a digital form.

For those more technically minded individuals, they say the rig runs on two Lithium batteries for a full day’s use, and it’s built using Google’s Android.

Speaking as an already tall hiker, I just have to say that the idea of hiking with a pack that goes up what appears to be 2 feet over my head just makes my back hurt imagining all the low branches I’ll have to navigate around.

Photo at the top of this post is courtesy of Google.