Google Maps Streetview function... WOW!

Phil Meadows

I just saw this today myself. I hope they do more cities soon. I wonder if this is the kind of thing they'd take submissions for, like buildings in the 3d Warehouse?

jeff jacobs

How long will it be before Google is walking through my living room. Wow.

boofredlay

Not in my town it's not! (He says with a southern draw)
At least not yet.
Pretty neat.

Gaieus

Obviously Google is (still) concentrating on bigger US cities only. Even SU is useless when there are extremely blurry images of vast areas - including quite big towns/cities, too. My place looks like a meadow with flowers (just some colour spots I mean) and you can hardly tell it's a city - therefore I made an image overlay (of only the historic centre) for myself to at least be able to navigate around:
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=669645

You can turn off the overlay to see how blurry it is actually. No way those street views will be available at most of the places soon!

ton baeten

Gaieus,
Take a look at Amsterdam in Google Earth and you will see they don't only concentrate on the US.
Google has created about 170.000 3D volumes, almost the whole city.
Only a few are detailed, yet. Now dutch SUppers can start becoming pro's in photo-matching.
I am curious how many years it will take before all those volumes really look like homes, offices and so on.

Greetings,
Ton

Gaieus

OK, Ton, I may have expressed myself less precisely than intended - by "concentrating" I was to mean that putting bigger emphasis on the US than other places. I also heard (not checked yet) that there are a whole tot of places in Japan full of 3D buildings by Google.

I haven't really surfed too much lately - maybe I should for GE seems to be "developing" faster than I thought before.

Thanks for the tip though; I haven't been to Amsterdam for more than a year now!

Paul Russam

Jeff:

@unknownuser said:

How long will it be before Google is walking through my living room. Wow.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/30/google_maps_is_spyin.html

Here are some other 'fun' finds:
http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/06/01/street-view-roundup/

Gaieus

Hehe... Paul, fortunately I live on the third (and fourth and fifth) floor. Hopefully they won't fly over the streets, too, to take shots of my naked butt when I get up skratching it in the morning...