Street View launched over a decade ago, and this vast image database is currently powering the Live View AR feature. An update to Google Maps for Android improves the Street View experience by adding a split screen mode.
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The Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was always going to be a momentous occasion, but it saw the unexpected creation of a truly delightful meme involving Senator Bernie Sanders sitting down. A fun meme generator, powered by Google Maps Street View, lets you have Bernie Sit down anywhere in the world.
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Google Maps and Earth are two useful pieces of software for getting around or learning more about our planet, and this week, Google is offering up some details on just what percentage of the planet these two services have mapped.
In addition to being a fun way to explore landmarks, Street View is useful for getting a detailed sense of where you’re going. Google Maps on the web has long provided a more useful Street View experience, but the Android app was just updated to match.
Google is settling in a lawsuit from 2010 regarding its Street View program after private data was obtained over Wi-Fi by the company’s Street View vehicles over the course of three years.
In 2017, Google introduced the first major upgrade to Street View cars in eight years aimed at capturing higher-resolution images. The Google Maps team is now slimming down the Street View Trekker backpack used for capturing 3D imagery on the go.
Google StreetView cars will soon be used to create maps of air pollution in London. They previously did the same in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Central Valley regions of California …
Back in September, Google Street View vehicles received their first major upgrade in eight years that should result in high-resolution images. Today, Google Research detailed a new algorithm that should address a common flaw with current Street View panoramas.
Back in 2015, Google announced a project to equip its Street View cars with air pollution sensors from Aclima to map air quality. Focussing on San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Central Valley regions of California, the company today announced those results.
Google has been working hard to capture remote landscapes that most people won’t ever be able to see in person, including a volcano. Street View’s latest adventure takes the viewer off of planet Earth and into the International Space Station (ISS)…
Google Street View is great for exploring an area from the comfort of your sofa, but if you want some more inspirational images to see how great a place can look, you probably seek out some better-quality photos. You may not have to do that for long thanks to a machine-learning project Google is running.
Google fed an experimental deep learning system a supply of professional photos from which to learn, then had it try its hand at emulating these from a set of around 40,000 plain old Street View snaps …
Google Search is now better at understanding art and surfacing relevant information. In partnership with the Arts & Culture team, there is a new interactive Knowledge Panel, while Street View in museums is using machine learning to recognize paintings.
Google Street View is known for the sometimes hilarious moments that it catches, and also for its remarkable ability to recognize human faces and blur them. I guess you might be able to call this case an amusing combination of both. In a screenshot grabbed by one Twitter user, it seems Google has (accidentally, probably) blurred out the face of a cow…
Street View is now a feature we take for granted in all our mapping services, but in 2007 it was a very ambitious effort by Google to photograph the world. The feature on the latest version of Google Maps on Android received a slight revamp to make navigation on mobile easier.
For most people, Google Map Street Views are their first interaction with 360 degree images. As people have begun to associate other 360 degree content as Street Views, Google will be taking advantage of the recognition. At today’s LG G5 event, Google announced that from now on shared Street Views will be stored in high quality for free.
Since it launched in 2007, Google Street View has captured both mundane and exotic locations, spanning from your front yard to majestic mountains and ancient cities from around the world. Most recently, the portable Street View backpack was spotted at Disney’s Magic Kingdom and Epcot parks in Florida…
In order to help monitor and show the effects climate change is having on the world around us, Google has teamed up with a number of global organizations to photograph various areas using its 360-degree Trekker camera. Using Street View in Google Maps, you can now take tours of a remote Manitoba habitat, some of the Amazonian rainforest and a Californian nature reserve…
When it comes to ancient cities, they don’t come much more exotic than Petra in Jordan, made famous by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and that’s where Google’s Trekker takes us with its latest Street View imagery. Google handed over its blog post announcing it to Queen Rania of Jordan.
To this day, after too many trips to count, Jordan’s ancient archeological site, the Rose-Red city of Petra, still fills me with awe. Concealed in majestic mountain gorges, visitors can wander through the entire city of Petra, imagining what life was like in the thriving trading center and capital of the Nabataean kingdom. Carved by hand into vibrant red, white and pink sandstone cliffs, it has, miraculously, survived earthquakes to withstand the test of time …
The backpack-based Google Trekker tours have taken us to some pretty spectacular places in the past, and the latest addition won’t disappoint. The Street View imagery covers seven of New Zealand’s world-famous ‘Great Walks,’ including some of the settings for the Hobbit movie trilogy … Expand
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If you’re like me, you sometimes use the Street View feature of Google Maps to see a place you’re about to visit and what its surrounding area looks like. Maybe you’re apartment hunting and want to see if the neighborhood looks safe. Regardless of why you do it, Google understands us and has made this previewing a tad easier.
Google Maps version 9.13.0 for Android places a thumbnail preview of a location in the bottom left corner of the screen for inputted addresses and places for which you’ve pressed and held on the map. It looks like this:
Tapping one of these previews brings up your standard Street View:
This version is available from Google Play, and an APK can be downloaded from APKMirror.
Aclima, a startup which builds an end-to-end hardware and software solution for detecting and analyzing the health and state of varying environmental surroundings (i.e. indoors where carbon dioxide can build in meeting rooms, outdoors where vehicles can release significant carbon monoxide), has announced a new partnership with Google which will see its sensors make their way onto Google Street View cars in the San Francisco Bay Area. Street View cars are the vehicles through which Google collects street-level imagery for its Maps street view product.
The ultimate goal for Aclima with partnerships including this one is to make data on air quality as easily accessible as the weather so that communities can better understand how air pollutants in their area are affecting human health and climate change, and start a dialog on improving local air quality.
Google’s self-driving cars are drawing a lot of attention and conversation online. Perhaps one of the biggest concerns from regular people like you and I is how safe they are. But as a recent video and blog post shows, you’re seemingly infinitely far more likely to be hit by another driver not paying attention, than your car malfunctioning and crashing in to someone else. But why do Google’s cars get hit so much?
Chris Urmson posted a really interesting article about what it’s like being hit by another car, driven by a human, while taking a ride in a self-driving Googlemobile. Urmson notes that the autonomous cars are being hit “surprisingly often”, despite their fancy array of sensors, processors and algorithms.
Googlers use their 20% in many different ways, and usually that means building a product or service they hope will someday see some amount of wider adoption. Gmail and AdSense were both built in 20% time, and now they’re two of Google’s biggest services.
Nat & Lo are going to do something a bit different. Since most people don’t ever get a chance to really see how Google ticks behind the scenes, Nat & Lo thought they would use their 20% time to show us — and they’re doing so via a newly-launched YouTube channel. Expand
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Yosemite’s El Capitan is one of the most famous rock-climbing locations in the world. Once considered impossible to climb, the 3000-foot route is still one of the most difficult climbs around. So naturally when the Google Street View team asked El Capitan veterans Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell to attempt it with the added challenge of 360-degree camera gear, they jumped at the chance.
Climbing is all about flirting with the impossible and pushing the boundaries of what you think you can be done. Capturing Street View imagery 3,000 feet up El Capitan proved to be an extension of that, especially when you take a camera meant for the inside of a restaurant and mount it thousands of feet up the world’s most iconic rock wall.
The imagery captured combines conventional stills of the climbers at work with the 360-degree cameras needed to allow you and I to join them in a virtual climb of the entire route … Expand
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Google is marking World Oceans Day, on Monday, with underwater Street View imagery in three amazing locations: Bali, the Bahamas and back to the Great Barrier Reef. The Google Maps blog says that the company wanted to draw attention to the environmental damage we are doing to our oceans.
Home to the majority of life on Earth, the ocean acts as its life support system, controlling everything from our weather and rainfall to the oxygen we breathe. Yet despite the ocean’s vital importance, the ocean is changing at a rapid rate due to climate change, pollution, and overfishing, making it one of the most serious environmental issues we face today.
The company says that mapping the ocean not only showcases its beauty, but also provides baseline imagery which can be used to monitor changes and highlight threats … Expand
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Madagascar is an island off the coast of Southeast Africa, formed around 88 million years ago, its plants and animals forming in relative isolation from the rest of the world. Over 90% of its wildlife is found only on the island – and you can now take a virtual trip there thanks to the latest Street View imagery from Google’s Trekker system … Expand
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Google is always expanding the imagery available in its Street View feature in Maps, and this evening the company has announced in a blog post that it has added new data from the Rideau Canal Skateway in Ottawa. The city is set to kick off its annular Winterlude Festival next week, which is a three-week long event that hosts a variety of games, shows, and activities.
Google is constantly bringing new imagery to its Street View feature in Maps, and this week the search giant is highlighting new additions from around Belgium. In what it describes as “some of the best of Belgium”, the new Street View data shows off five different locations including the inside of a castle and a World War II memorial. Expand
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The world’s cheapest virtual reality headset may be just a bit of fun by Google, but the company hasn’t just put it out there and forgotten about it. An easter egg in Google Maps for Android lets you use Google Cardboard to take a virtual reality tour of places like the world’s tallest building – Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
Double-tap the navigation icon bottom-right to activate VR mode, then view through Google Cardboard.
Google recently announced that half a million people are using Cardboard as it offered new SDKs to software developers and opened a dedicated section of the Google play store for cardboard apps.
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Google, in a post on the Geo Developers Blog, today announced the ability for website owners to embed Street View panoramas and Photospheres within their site using an HTML snippet. Google launched this feature for Maps last year, but only today did it add support for Street View and public Photospheres.
Today, we added the ability to easily embed the Street View and Photo Sphere images you find in Google Maps and we’re also enabling the same capabilities programmatically in the Google Maps Embed API. These embeds use the new imagery viewer technology that powers Street View in the new Google Maps.
One from The Dept of You Couldn’t Make It Up. A court has awarded a Canadian woman $2,250 in damages against Google for showing her cleavage in a Street View image, reports Le Journal de Montréal (via GigiOM).
Photographed by a Street View car in 2009 while sitting on her stoop leaning forward in a low-cut top, the judge ruled that Mario Pia Grillo suffered shock and embarrassment when co-workers spotted the image.
Google had automatically blurred her face, but the court accepted her argument that she was identifiable from the fact she was sitting outside her own home. Google subsequently blurred her entire home.
Quebec’s legal system is modelled on that of some European countries, like France, where you retain a right to privacy against intrusive photography even in a public place.
No, that’s not where Apple Maps will take you when you ask for directions to Starbucks, but close! It’s the Liwa Desert in the United Arab Emirates, and Google Maps has captured the site in detail for exploring through Street View thanks in part to camels:
To bring this stunning desert to Street View, we fashioned the Trekker to rest on a camel, which gathered imagery as it walked. Using camels for the collection allowed us to collect authentic imagery and minimize our disruption of this fragile environment.
Google Street View cars have been busy, adding Mason and Grand Ledge in the U.S., expanding coverage of Malaysia and adding in Argentina, reports the Google Earth Blog – the Grand Ledge Opera House shown above. This follows Google adding Cambodia and Indonesia last month.
Google has already added historical Street View links to a few locations in Argentina, the dates indicating that Google has been collecting the imagery for around a year.
Google’s Street View cars are doing more than taking photos these days, the company using some of them to detect methane leaks from corroded pipes, landfill sites and other sources. The company’s more notorious form of data-collection – wifi sniffing – resulted in a $7M settlement, the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting its attempt to appeal the lawsuit.
Google has added a gorgeous new set of Street View imagery, quoting Tales of Iceland author Stephen Markley in describing the views as “soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming” … Expand
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New Scientist reports that Google is now using Street View cars to detect methane leaks from corroded pipes, landfill sites and other sources.
Sensors strapped to the top of the cars have mapped hundreds of methane leaks around Boston, New York’s Staten Island and Indianapolis […]
Methane leaks are a triple threat: they can cause explosions, accelerate the growth of global warming and waste money. A study last year found that US methane emissions are 1.5 to 1.7 times higher than current estimates, a discrepancy that has been attributed to hard-to-detect leaks …
Amidst the ‘controversy’ of the recently-introduced ‘right to be forgotten‘ on Google, the Independent reports that celebrities and other public figures are asking Google to blur the Street View images of their homes. Musicians Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Lily Allen and Katherine Jenkins are amongst those named as having taken advantage of the Google tool to request this. Google’s Street View privacy page says that in addition to the blurring it already does automatically (including faces, some street numbers and some homes), additional blurring is done on request.
We provide easily accessible tools allowing users to request further blurring of any image that features the user, their family, their car or their home. In addition to the automatic blurring of faces and license plates, we will blur the entire car, house, or person when a user makes this request for additional blurring.
(via Gizmodo)
The US Supreme Court rejected Google’s attempt to appeal a class-action lawsuit claiming the search giant violated federal wiretap laws when its Street View vehicles collected data from private WiFi networks. In 2010, Google said that it accidentally recorded data from unencrypted WiFi networks, stating it immediately grounded its cars and reached out to regulators to find out how to properly dispose of the information that it collected.
WebUrbanist drew our attention to a Tumblr blog that captures the sad decline of Detroit from 2009 to 2013 using images captured from Google’s Street View time machine.
Back in April, Google added a clock icon to the top-left corner of images, which opens out into a slider that allows you to see the same image photographed at different times … Expand
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Police in Edinburgh, Scotland, were called out to investigate when someone using Google Street View thought they’d spotted an axe-murder, reports the Independent. The series of images apparently showed someone being struck with an axe and the assailant walking away from the lifeless body on the ground.
The scene turned out to be a prank by a couple of quick-thinking mechanics who said they had 20 seconds to think of something to do when they spotted the Google car approaching.
“It was in the spur of the moment,” Dan Thompson said. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do so I threw myself on the ground and Gary [Kerr] grabbed a pick-axe handle from the garage.
“We only had about 20 seconds – it was all we could think of.”
The way that Google stitches Street View images together, which often leave visible breaks, added to the illusion, seeming to show a chopped-off hand.
The pair of jokers said that fortunately the two police officers who turned up to check it out saw the funny side.
They were already pretty certain it was a joke because one of their colleagues gets their car serviced here. They thought it was a really good laugh and in five minutes they were gone.
Certainly beats mooning or a couple getting amorous.
While technology hasn’t quite reached the stage of allowing us to watch the Winter Olympics from within Google Street View, you can now take a virtual wander through the host city of Sochi. The games are scheduled to take place there from 7th to 23rd February.
Street View coverage in Russia also now includes Vladivostok, Irkutsk and Yakutsk – though you may want to put on your coat for the latter: as the city with the greatest seasonal temperature swings on Earth, the lowest recorded winter temperature was a bracing -83.9F (-64.4C).
Google also added its first imagery in Slovenia, making the central European nation the 56th country to be added to Street View.
Check out some other cool (not all of them quite so literally) places you can visit on Street View with our roundup here.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi-ljpuEGnA]
The latest area to be added to Google Street View is the test track from the original British version of Top Gear, with the imagery featuring The Stig challenging the Google car to a race in a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG … Expand
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Exploring cities in Google Maps or Google Earth can be a great way to get a sense of a place leading up to a planned trip, as well as a way to enjoy a vicarious visit to places you’re never likely to visit in person. Exploring Tokyo in Google Maps just got a whole lot more interesting thanks to 3D imagery just added by Google … Expand
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Google Street View has taken us to some pretty funky places, including the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Eiffel Tower, a Bond villain’s lair, a trek up to the top of Mount Fuji , animal park tours, a Venice Gondola ride and visits inside Dr Who’s TARDIS, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and a submarine.
But there are still some places Street View doesn’t yet reach, so if you have a favourite hike, cycle ride or rock climb you want to share with others, you can now create your own Street View style tours through Google’s Views community.
Have you ever tried to convey the feeling of walking through your favorite park? Or have you wanted to create a virtual tour of your business to attract customers? Well, starting today, it’s now possible for you to build your own Street View experiences to do just that. Using a new feature in our Views community, you can easily connect your photo spheres to create 360º virtual tours of the places you love, then share them with the world on Google Maps …
Shortly after a Street View tour of London’s Gatwick Airport, Google has expanded its transit program to encompass 15 other airports, more than 50 train & metro stations – and even allows your virtual trips to take you right onto an airliner at Dubhai.
Google’s blog shows off a small selection of the new locations, including check-in at Madrid airport, arrivals at Tokyo airport, a walk though London’s Waterloo train station and locating your seat on board an Emirates A380 airliner.
The split view, showing both terminal map and Street View walk-thru, is particularly helpful for familiarising yourself with a transit airport in advance of a tight connection … Expand
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I sometimes wonder whether future generations will do most of their travel sat at their PCs, as Google’s Trekker backpack takes us to more and more interesting places. Latest on the list is the romantic Italian city Venice, built on a set of more than 100 small islands, connected by a network of canals and bridges … Expand
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Not sure I’ve ever seen it quite this empty …
Finding your way around large airport terminals can be one of life’s more frustrating experiences, especially when you’re in a hurry and for no reason any human being can understand, gates 22-24 are not between gates 21 and 25.
Google is helping lost travellers find their way around London’s second-largest airport, with full Street View imagery of both North and South terminals.
Take your virtual visit here.
Other Street View tours created with Google’s Trekker backpack includes the River Thames, the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Eiffel Tower, a Bond villain’s lair, a trek up to the top of Mount Fuji , animal park tours, a look around the inside of Dr Who’s TARDIS, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and a submarine.
Google just announced a few updates rolling out to the new Google Maps desktop app today. Users will now be able to highlight StreetView imagery, user-uploaded photos, and PhotoSpheres on the map by clicking a new pegman icon in the lower right corner of their screen (pictured above). StreetView imagery will be highlighted in light blue, Photo Spheres as darker blue circles, and indoor imagery as yellow circles.
In addition, the update brings a touch of Google Earth over to the Maps desktop app with new bird’s-eye view 3D Earth Tours for all WebGL-enabled browsers.
Explore beautiful, 3D imagery of buildings and terrain for thousands of locations from above with Earth Tours available right in your browser.* Wherever you see the Earth Tour icon, you can click, sit back, and get a virtual tour from a soaring angle. Dive into Boston or circle the Alps.
Google is also rolling out a new preview UI for directions. Now, when viewing individual steps for directions you’ll see StreetView imagery on each step where available, allowing you to get a better sense of your surroundings for an upcoming turn or exit. Google also notes that it has integrated real time traffic incident reports from its Waze acquisition like it recently did in its mobile Google Maps apps.
The new Google Maps desktop app is rolling out to all that opted into the new Google Maps preview today and to everyone else in teh coming weeks. Google also just released a video preview for the new Google Maps desktop experience that shows off some of the new features in today’s update: Expand
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Google’s ever-expanding set of virtual tours now include a boat trip down the River Thames in London, allowing many of London’s most famous sights to be seen from a new perspective, reports the Telegraph.
Ed Parsons, Geospatial technologist at Google UK, said: “The river also offers some of the most scenic and iconic views of London from arguably the best vantage points the city has to offer, and we are thrilled to be able to work with the PLA so that users from around the world can experience the Thames through Street View.” Expand
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