Google Street View car
Its been more than a year since I first wrote that Street View had quickly turned Google’s otherwise slick and useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D street-level peep-show par excellance. Since then I’ve had an image in my mind of a white van with the Google logo on it cruising around imaging all those streets for some reason. I guess if I had been really interested I would have found some stories like this one that revealed early on that they were actually using a VW bug, but I didn’t know that. When I discovered a couple street view images with the car still in the image, I thought I had discovered some big secret…
Normally when you use Street View, if you click and hold the mouse and drag ap ( so that you can look down at the road surface) you’ll just see the road because they stitch the images together and remove the little black Bug photography vehicle from the image, but the other day I found a little section of Rt. 231 in Deer Park, LI which still had the vehicle image in it for some reason. Maybe they just got too busy taking pics of the Tour de France route to notice.
Comment posted on 11-30-2008
[...] View is a nifty web mapping application that allows you to view actual 3D photos taken from the Google Vehicle Cam of any place the car has imaged. Since Google Street View went live, Google has done its level best [...]