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Google Maps "Street View"

WildCat

NWO Master Conspirator
WildCat
Joined
Mar 23, 2003
Messages
59,856
Has anyone used this yet? It is unreal, apparently Google has vans going around taking pics every few seconds. The street I live on now isn't mapped yet, but my old place is. Used to live in the coach house behind the yellow building directly to the west in this view (put the little man on the tip of the green arrow). And my favorite restaurant is just around the corner.

I wonder how much manpower Google is devoting to this effort?
 
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WildCat said:
I wonder how much manpower Google is devoting to this effort?
Click to expand...

Well, there is a fleet of Chevy Cobalts with cameras on top that was spotted in the Google parking lot. There have also been reports that they have contracted with some outside companies to take some of the photos.

Meanwhile, folks on the web have devoted tons of time to it too, for instance trying to find odd things in the photos, and arguing over whether it invades their privacy. Google has even indicated they may change it a bit to adhere to Canadian privacy laws.

--Tim Farley

P.S. Incidentally, if you are interested in whether your town is covered, zoom Google Maps out until you can see your entire country, and click the Street View button if it is visible. Camera icons appear over each city which has current coverage.
 
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Yup! I use when planning my high-security save the world secret missions!

i.e. Finding fast food and book stores.

I like it.
 
I heard the Google vans wanted to come to Europe but our Human Rights Laws would be breached.
 
AgeGap said:
I heard the Google vans wanted to come to Europe but our Human Rights Laws would be breached.
Click to expand...

Yes, this could be an issue in Canada as well. There was some talk that they might use multiple photos made as the car moves along, with some differential image editing, to "scrub" all people out of the photos in countries where privacy laws might be breached.

Which raises the interesting possibility of towns being exhaustively documented photographically, but as if they have no actual residents. Google might bring us a view of a world previously seen only in "Twilight Zone" episodes.

--Tim Farley
 
AgeGap said:
I heard the Google vans wanted to come to Europe but our Human Rights Laws would be breached.
Click to expand...

Hehe, well the European equivalent of Google Maps Street View has been going for quite a few years already :)

http://www.cyclomedia.nl/

Cyclomedia have vehicles with a proprietary (and pretty sophisticated) hardware and software that allow them to drive around taking 360 degree images every 10 meters. I cannot comment on the specific technology they use (I do some contract work for them and cannot disclose trade secrets), but the next version - which is currently in trials, allows them take pictures at 10m intervals while maintaining a speed of around 80km/h. The processing this requires is staggering.

They already have all of the Netherlands imaged and are expanding to include Belgium and other European countries.

In fact we have just finished a pretty cool integration with Google Earth that plots the panoramic images on the Google Earth satellite view, allowing one to click on the top-down satellite image and bring up the ground level panorama at that location. The uses this technology has already been put to are numerous and pretty interesting in most cases.
 
Popular Mechanics just posted an article on the company Google is paying to do this today. The writer rode along in the car and there is even a raw video of what the car sees:

For the past seven months, Kevin Nanzer has been on the road almost nonstop, living in and out of motel rooms and corporate apartments. He’s crisscrossed the country, living for weeks at a time in cities like Austin, Texas, Oklahoma City, Okla., Raleigh, N.C., and Albany, N.Y.

Nanzer, 23, is a geoimmersive data producer for Immersive Media, a Canadian company that specializes in the fast-growing world of “spherical video”—aka mapping the world for Google and beyond. For 5 hours each day (the most he can film because of the sun’s angle to the Earth), Nanzer and a co-worker drive anywhere from 80 to 200 miles through a major city, capturing video and location data of every single street, bridge and highway.
Click to expand...

The article is here.

--Tim Farley
 
Wow! Thanks for posting that, WildCat! I didn't know of this feature yet.

My dad is gonna love this, 'walking' through New York :)
I found the appartment we stayed at when we where there.
 
WildCat said:
Has anyone used this yet? It is unreal, apparently Google has vans going around taking pics every few seconds. The street I live on now isn't mapped yet, but my old place is. Used to live in the coach house behind the yellow building directly to the west in this view (put the little man on the tip of the green arrow). And my favorite restaurant is just around the corner.

I wonder how much manpower Google is devoting to this effort?
Click to expand...

Probably a fair amount. The same van/camera setup is used by NavTeq to generate all the map data that Google uses, and I can imagine that Google would very much like to be competing with them rather than vending from them, and adding new dimensions while they're at it. They also have a couple of satellites in orbit doing high-res overheads for their map offerings; in the past the maps project has been rather patchy about resolutions and quality of images, but that is improving quickly. Some of the coverage in eastern and midwestern states can sure use it.
 
Tracer Bullet said:
Then how can Britain have hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras?
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Good point! On a recent news programme, it was explained that many of them are operated illegally. It was also noted that they had very little effect on crime levels. Better street lighting caused a bigger reduction in crime levels.
 
I think its an absolutely fantastic idea, but I don't know if they should blur faces or not.

Good work google!

PS. How friggin' AWESOME do all those Chevy's look!
 
AgeGap said:
Good point! On a recent news programme, it was explained that many of them are operated illegally. It was also noted that they had very little effect on crime levels. Better street lighting caused a bigger reduction in crime levels.
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that the cameras aren't really put in place for crime prevention but rather to aid the police in solving crimes, since so much of Britain is covered by them.
 
AgeGap said:
I heard the Google vans wanted to come to Europe but our Human Rights Laws would be breached.
Click to expand...
There's something to that. Just using newspaper articles on the Obama/Rezco mini-scandal I was able to find the publicly available property transfer records for the property online and then use Street View to look at Obama's house, all in about 5 minutes. Turns out I drive right by it probably 3 days out of the week (in fact I'm working a few blocks away from there this week) and never knew it.
 
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